Swathi Ganesh

Swathi Ganesh is a graduate student in chemical engineering developing systems engineering tools to predict, estimate, and control precipitation across pharmaceutical manufacturing systems. She develops coupled population balance models to capture nucleation, growth, and aggregation during precipitation in a range of systems, including the lipid nanoparticle formation process. She then discretizes such models into high-dimensional, stiff ordinary differential equations and uses MATLAB solvers for efficient numerical integration. Additionally, real-time monitoring of particle size distribution in lipid nanoparticle manufacturing remains challenging due to fast precipitation kinetics and sensor noise. To provide robust particle size estimates, Swathi designs a Luenberger observer that exploits the cascade structure of spatially discretized models, characterizing observability decay via theoretical Gramian analysis. As a MathWorks Fellow, Swathi will continue to develop this observer and extend the framework toward closed-loop control using model predictive control. Her integrated computational platform aims to demonstrate the feasibility of real-time soft sensors and control for continuous biotherapeutic manufacturing.