Abo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, will award an honorary doctorate to Christodoulos Floudas, the Stephen C. Macaleer ’63 Professor of Engineering and Applied Science.

The university cited Floudas for outstanding research in process systems engineering, as well as his scientific exchange and collaboration with Abo Akademi. The university will bestow the honor at its graduation ceremony May 23.

Floudas, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has applied his fundamental expertise in chemical engineering and computational mathematics to a wide range of fields, from molecular biology and medicine to the synthesis of industrial chemicals. In one longstanding avenue of work, Floudas has developed mathematical optimization techniques that allow biologists and medical experts to precisely manipulate the three-dimensional structure of proteins by slightly modifying their chemical compositions. This work has led to greatly improved approaches to developing pharmaceuticals. In recent work, he has developed comprehensive models for producing liquid fuels from a wide range of feedstocks, including biomass and municipal solid waste. These approaches have the potential to greatly improve the efficiency of fuel production and reduce carbon emissions.

Floudas, who joined the Princeton faculty in 1986, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011, the highest U.S. honor for engineers. He is a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Texas A&M Institute for Advanced Study, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineering. In addition to nearly 300 peer-reviewed journal articles, Floudas has written and edited numerous books and chapters, including the Encyclopedia of Optimization, now in its second edition. At Princeton, he is an associated faculty member in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics and the Center for Quantitative Biology.