Panelists

Panelist for 2026 Dow-MSU Symposium: 

Panel Speakers: 7th Annual Dow-MSU Graduate Professional Development Symposium

 

Large Company (Dow, Midland)

Amrita Sen is a Senior Research Specialist at Dow in Midland, Michigan, where her work focuses on sustainability assessments and circularity driven solutions for the chemical industry. She supports process modeling, methodology development, and workflow automation for sustainability disclosures to enable data‑driven decision‑making across Dow's R&D, business, and corporate organizations.

Amrita earned her PhD in Chemical Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2024, with her research spanning life cycle assessment, techno‑economic analysis, and process systems engineering. She is passionate about applying state-of-the-art sustainability methods to real‑world industrial challenges and enjoys collaborating across academia and industry to advance circular and sustainable solutions. She is actively involved in professional development, mentorship, and technical community building and looks forward to outreach and professional growth opportunities and fostering an inclusive engineering community in the Mid‑Michigan area.

 

2. Small Company (Network Partners Group)

Tony Trier is a senior consultant with Network Partners Group (NPG), serving clients in the medical device and pharmaceutical industries. Tony graduated from Michigan State’s School of Packaging (BS, 2009; MS, 2012, Ph.D., 2016) with a focus in aseptic presentation and usability of medical device packaging.  Tony is co-chair of the Kilmer Innovations in Packaging (KiiP) working group on Aseptic Handling, and has contributed to ASTM working groups in Packaging Usability (WK 77855) and Aseptic Presentation test method development (WK 90318).  

Tony’s career has involved 10 years of service in driving compliance to EU and FDA regulations, providing sterile and compliant packaging for both pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

 

3. Academia (Department of Chemistry, MSU)

Joseph Gair is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Michigan State University. He received his undergraduate training at Saint John’s University where he studied organometallic synthesis with Chris Schaller. Following an undergraduate research experience with Jeff Johnson at Hope College, Joe taught middle school chemistry in Hanga Tanzania for one year. He pursued a PhD in the lab of Jared Lewis at the University of Chicago where he studied C-H functionalization.

Joe then spent a year at Vertex Pharmaceuticals where he witnessed how synthetic innovation accelerates drug discovery. He conducted postdoctoral research in the lab or Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University studying enantioselective S_N2 reactions of ion pairs. Joe spent a year working with Eugene Kwan in the Data Rich Experimentation group at Merck where he evaluated computational methods for modeling organic reactions. Joe began his position at Michigan State University in 2023. Gair’s group is focused on the invention and application of synthetic methods that fine-tune structural motifs prevalent in drug discovery and catalyst design. Outside of research and teaching, Joe is enthusiastic about having fun outside, chasing his kids, and family singalongs to the music of Daniel Tiger.

 

4. National Lab (Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee)

Dr. Zili Wu is currently the Leader of Surface Chemistry and Catalysis Group at Chemical Science Division and a Research & Development Staff member at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Deputy Director of the recently funded DOE Energy EarthShot Research Center (EERC) - Non-equilibrium Energy Transfer for Efficient Reactions (NEETER), and Thrust 2 Leader in the UNCAGE-ME Center, one of DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs). He obtained his PhD in physical chemistry at Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in 2001 and spent over 3 years at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral associate before joining the staff of ORNL in 2006.

He has extensive experience in heterogeneous catalysis, applied spectroscopy and nanomaterial synthesis. His research interests lie in the fundamental understanding of catalytic active sites on the surfaces and interfaces involved in heterogeneous catalysis, photocatalysis and electrocatalysis, establishing structure-catalysis relationships in catalytic solids as a function of time and space, using in situ and operando characterization methods, and fabricating nanomaterials with well-defined structures. He is an active ACS member and has organized more than 15 ACS Symposia in the area of fundamental catalysis and energy materials.