Yash Puranik obtained his PhD in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Under the NETL's National Emissions Reduction Initiative, Yash is supporting the development of open-source optimization and machine learning tools that can provide decision support for prioritization and effective resource utilization for plugging and abandonment (P&A) campaigns. Yash's research interest center around optimization theory and their applications. Yash has extensive experience in software implementations of optimization algorithms and their practical applications in the energy industry.