Thomas F. Edgar is the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the UT Energy Institute. For over 40 years, Edgar has concentrated his academic work in process modeling, control, and optimization, and has published over 450 articles and book chapters in the above fields applied to separations, chemical reactors, energy systems, and semiconductor manufacturing. His research has focused on control theory and computation for nonlinear and large-scale systems where he has supervised more than 80 Ph.D. students. Dr. Edgar is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and has received a number of major AIChE research, education, and service awards. Dr. Edgar is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and won the AACC Ragazzini Education Award in 1992.  He served as the 1997 President of AIChE and was President of the American Automatic Control Council between 1989 and 1991. He co-directs the Texas-Wisconsin-California Control Consortium (TWCCC), which is supported by 12 companies and involves six faculty members from UT, UW, and USC. TWCCC has been very effective in bridging control theory and industrial practice and has been responsible for many advances in multivariable control, performance monitoring, fault detection, identification, and real-time optimization that have been applied by chemical, semiconductor, and energy companies during the past 20 years. Edgar has co-authored the textbooks Optimization of Chemical Processes (McGraw-Hill, 1988 and 2001) and Process Dynamics and Control (Wiley, 1989, 2004 and 2011) with Dale Seborg, Duncan Mellichamp, and Frank Doyle. It is currently in its 4th edition revision and is the dominant control textbook in chemical engineering departments. Recently, Tom Edgar has helped lead the national effort on smart manufacturing and is co-founder of the Smart Manufacturing Leadership Coalition, which has 40 members from university, industry, government, and non-government organizations.