Awards
- Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Supervision, Queen's University
- MITACS Mentorship Award for Graduate Student Supervision
- Premier's Research Excellence Award
- NSERC Women's Faculty Award
- Golden Apple Teaching Award
- First Year Teaching and Learning Award
- Governor General's Gold Medal
Research Interests
- Mathematical Modeling
- Parameter Estimation
- Process Monitoring and Control
- Polymerization
- Polymer Gel Dosimetry
Current and Recent Research Projects
Kim McAuley's research group develops mathematical models of chemical and biochemical processes. Her students derive equations to describe rates of chemical reactions and the movement of chemical species and energy within multi-phase systems. The models are used by companies and other academic researchers to predict product quality, production rates and the effectiveness of operating and control strategies. Some models also help medical physicists understand the influence of chemistry on the effectiveness of gel dosimeters used for 3-D verification of radiation doses for cancer treatment.
One of the most difficult problems faced by modelers is determining appropriate values for parameters that appear in model equations. Prof. McAuley leads a research project on Advanced Parameter Estimation Tools for Building Mathematical Models of Chemical Processes, which is sponsored by MITACS and several companies. Models are being developed to help companies simulate, monitor, optimize and control their industrial processes and novel methods are being developed for estimating parameters in a variety of challenging situations including:
- models with a large number of parameter and insufficient data to reliably estimate all of them
- simplified models and models with imperfect structure
- models of processes influenced by random process disturbances
In another research project, Kim McAuley and John Schreiner of the Southeastern Ontario Cancer Centre develop fundamental models of polymer gel dosimeters used for calibrating 3-D radiation dose distributions generated by cancer radiotherapy equipment. Experiments and models are being used to design improved polymer dosimeters that are safer to use and that will have improved accuracy using a variety of read-out techniques.
Funding (2001-2011)
Abbott Point of Care, BASF, BP Chemicals, CAMM, CFI, Cybernetica, DSM, DuPont, Hatch, INEOS, Matrikon, MITACS, Novelis, Praxair, Shell Global Solutions, NSERC (Discovery, CRD, IPS), OIT, Premier's Research Excellence Award, SAS, Xerox.
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