Population Balances in Biomedical Engineering: Segregation Through the Distribution of Cell States

Martin A. Hjorts, Ph.D, is Chevron Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He received his master's degree in chemical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark in 1978 working in the area of computational fluid mechanics. His Ph.D. dissertation project, carried out at the Chemical Engineering department at the University of Houston and Caltech, was on the application of population balance models to the budding yeast cell cycle. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Houston in 1983 and has been a member of the Chemical Engineering faculty at Louisiana State University since then. Since joining the faculty at LSU, he has maintained an interest and an active research program in population balances, applying these models to problems in cell adhesion, hairy root growth kinetics, and autonomously oscillating yeast cultures. The work, published in the scientific literature and presented at international meetings, earned him the 1995 Dean's Research Award. In addition to teaching the usual chemical engineering classes at LSU, Dr. Hjortso has taught classes on population balance modeling both at LSU and, as Otto Monsted Visiting Researcher, at the Center for Process Biotechnology at the Technical University of Denmark.