The Institute for Systems Design and Optimization was established in 1967 and is administered through the College of Engineering and the Engineering Experiment Station. The institute provides channels of communication among various disciplines throughout the university in the design and optimization of engineering systems, thereby promoting interdisciplinary research and teaching in systems engineering.
Current research projects focus on the synthesis, design and optimization of environmentally benign and sustainable biochemical processes, such as biochemical production of butanol, ethanol and acetone from biomass-based feedstocks and the thermal-efficiency analysis of these processes in terms of available energy. The institute is also participating in a major international collaborative effort on the identification of metabolic pathways. This effort could contribute to the discovery of new drugs.