Banafsheh Jabarivelisdeh successfully defended her thesis
Ms. Jabarivelisdeh researched on "Bioprocess Optimization and Control using Dynamic Constraint-based Models".
Banafsheh Jabarivelisdeh, one of our IMPRS students, successfully accomplished her PhD on March 1st, 2021. She joined the IMPRS in December 2014 and worked in the Group of “Systems Theory and Automatic Control”. The title of her PhD thesis is “Bioprocess Optimization and Control using Dynamic Constraint-based Models”.
Her research focused on developing advanced model-based approaches for improved performance of bioprocesses, such that desired engineering objectives are addressed by deriving optimal control strategies.
Determination of bioreactor operating policies for an optimal performance is a challenging task due to the highly variable nature of biological systems. To address this challenge, she implemented model-based optimization and control approaches to conduct in silico experiments in order to derive strategies for temporal manipulations of metabolism for improved process productivity. Her work was based on dynamic metabolic-genetic network models which provides proper levels of detail to address the full metabolic versatility and makes identifying optimal genetic and process level manipulation strategies feasible.
Moreover, advanced bioprocess control and optimization requires flexible and robust control strategy which guarantees the performance of the model-based approach in the presence of disturbances and existing uncertainties. To this aim, she integrated on-line adaptation schemes (Model predictive control and Moving horizon estimation) within the modeling approach to address time-varying process characteristics. The proposed adaptive approach could allow for online adaptation of the underlying model by estimating uncertain and variable model parameters in different growth stages, in order to control highly dynamic bioprocesses efficiently.
