A biographical review of the research and impacts of Marco Duran

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Marco Duran was born on January 29, 1955, in Salvatierra, Mexico. He obtained his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) in Mexico City in 1976. He obtained his MS degree in chemical engineering at UAM (Metropolitan Autonomous University) Iztapalapa, Mexico City in 1978. He became a faculty member at UAM that year, in which he also married his wife Dolores (Lola), with whom they later had three children, Gabriela, Andrés and Diego. In 1981 Marco enrolled as a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh where Ignacio Grossmann had the great fortune to be his Ph.D. advisor. Marco graduated in 1984 and returned to UAM in Mexico where he was a faculty member in the chemical engineering department, 1985–1988. He moved in 1989, to the Corporate Research laboratories of ExxonMobil Research and Engineering at Annandale, N.J., where he initially took a position as a visiting fellow and was subsequently hired as a full time researcher. Marco’s work at Exxon was in the areas of Applied Mathematics, Modeling and Computational Optimization. Throughout all the years, Marco successfully demonstrated the value of Mathematical Optimization in the petroleum industry for which he was recognized internally at Exxon and later ExxonMobil. In 2007 he left ExxonMobil to pursue work in consulting. Unfortunately on December 12, 2018, Marco passed away after a long illness. He will be remembered as a pioneer and a first rate research scientist who made outstanding and long lasting contributions in the areas of mathematical optimization and process systems engineering. He will also be remembered as a major representative of academic excellence in Mexico. …