Yoel Rene Cortes-Pena



Headshot of Yoel

Education

  • Ph.D., Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2023
  • M.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, May 2019
  • B.S., Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2016

  • I am currently a postdoc in the Zavala Lab working on advanced computational methods for process simulation with applications to biomanufacturing, plastic upcycling, and waste valorization. I did my Ph.D. with Prof. Jeremy Guest at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). During my Ph.D., I was also part of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), where I created tools to design, simulate, and perform techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment of biorefineries. Using these tools, I perform rigorous uncertainty and sensitivity analyses to navigate trade-offs and charter development roadmaps for emerging and conceptual technologies. I’m the lead developer of BioSTEAM and core contributor to Caleb Bell’s chemicals library.