Pedro Castro is an Associate Professor at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Universidade de Lisboa. Before, he was an Assistant Researcher at Laboratório Nacional de Energia and Geologia (2002-2014) and a Principal Investigator (2014-2022) at CMAFcIO, a research unit of Faculdade de Ciências. He graduated (1997) in Chemical Engineering from IST as best student of his class, later achieving his PhD (2001) and Habilitation (2020). Between 2004 and 2013, he spent a total of 18 months in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University working in collaboration with Professor Ignacio Grossmann.
His research interests at the interface between Chemical Engineering and Operations Research, known as Process Systems Engineering (PSE). Most of his research has focused on the solution of real-life industrial problems from a variety of sectors: pulp and paper (Metsä Tissue, Celulose do Caima, Portucel); chemicals (SASOL, Dow Chemical, Unilever, Hovione); cement and steel (ABB, Acciai Speciali Terni); plastics (Ferro Portugal) and petroleum (ExxonMobil, Ecopetrol). He is better known for his mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models and MILP-based algorithms for process scheduling and global optimization of non-convex problems with quadratic terms. These rely on the Resource-Task Network (RTN), Multiparametric Disaggregation Technique, and Generalized Disjunctive Programming.
Pedro Castro has authored more than 80 ISI-indexed journal articles (12% as single, 64% as first and 77% as corresponding author), receiving over 3400 citations in Scopus for an h-index of 32. He has been invited to give lectures and short courses worldwide.