Emerging Technologies In Reactor Design

Jillian Sheeran is Associate Director of Engineering at Snapdragon Chemistry in Waltham, MA, where she has worked for ten years, joining as a founding member in 2015. She holds an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University and is an author or co-author of six publications and two patents.

She is a leader in continuous manufacturing and specializes in moving projects from R&D through to multikilogram scales. Her expertise spans chemical engineering, process development, continuous flow manufacturing, and advanced reactor design, particularly for complex flow processes.

Asked which emerging technologies will reshape reactor and process design, Sheeran points to automated systems, feedback control loops, and machine learning, which are already influencing how reactors are designed for scale-up in both R&D and manufacturing. In R&D especially, real-time data monitoring supplies continuous feedback without frequent sampling, allowing a process to run uninterrupted while the data accumulates.