Vito Anthony Canuso IV
B.S. Chemical Engineering, UCLA 2020
M.S. Chemical Engineering, UCLA 2022
Process Design Engineer, Technip Energies
“Make the most of the time and resources you have at UCLA. Trust me, you will miss them when they are gone.”
As a Process Design Engineer at Technip Energies, Vito Anthony Canuso IV helps turn chemical engineering concepts into the equipment and processes used in real industrial facilities.
Since completing his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at UCLA, Vito has worked on projects involving hydrogen production, sustainable aviation fuel, ethylene manufacturing, and carbon capture. His experience has included both established industrial technologies and first-of-a-kind processes intended to support a lower-carbon energy system.
Much of his day-to-day work takes place inside process simulation software and spreadsheets. He models chemical processes, designs equipment such as reactors, heat exchangers, separators, compressors, and pumps, writes technical reports, and meets with clients to translate project goals into workable engineering designs.
Although the work is highly technical, its purpose is straightforward: determine how raw materials can be transformed safely, efficiently, and at industrial scale. Vito has contributed to projects involving green, gray, and blue hydrogen, as well as renewable fuels and carbon-capture technologies. These areas are increasingly important as industries work to reduce emissions while continuing to produce the fuels, chemicals, and materials used throughout modern life.
He has also had opportunities to visit operating plants and see units designed by his company in action. That experience connects back to one of his clearest memories from UCLA: an AIChE tour of the Marathon refinery. It was the first time Vito had seen an operating chemical plant in person. The scale of the facility immediately stood out to him.
“I specifically remember driving by a rusted tube bundle pulled out of a heat exchanger and being shocked by how huge it was,” he said.
In classroom diagrams, heat exchangers can appear relatively simple and are sometimes overshadowed by equipment such as reactors and distillation columns. Seeing the physical size of the equipment helped Vito understand the enormous scale at which chemical engineering principles are applied.
“That was one of the moments that reinforced that chemical engineering was the right major for me,” he said.
After earning his bachelor’s degree in 2020, Vito remained at UCLA to complete his master’s degree in 2022. He then joined Technip Energies, where he has worked as a process engineer for four years.
His UCLA training prepared him to move between technologies that can look very different on the surface. Whether a project involves hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, petrochemicals, or carbon capture, the underlying task is often the same: break a complicated process into recognizable chemical engineering principles and unit operations.
“UCLA prepared me well to understand how to apply the principles of chemical engineering to any of the technologies that I was thrown into,” Vito said.
Some projects relied on mature technologies, while others involved systems being developed or deployed for the first time. He also found that courses he selected based on personal interest, including electrochemistry and membrane separations, became unexpectedly useful later in his career. That experience shapes the advice he gives current students.
“Looking back, I have found that the concepts I remember most were the concepts that genuinely interested me,” he said. “When it comes to self-motivated study, my own passion and enthusiasm were the best motivators.”
He encourages students to bring that curiosity into the senior capstone experience, where they must learn how to approach an unfamiliar process, identify the important questions, and apply fundamentals to a complex design problem. According to Vito, that ability matters more in an early-career engineering role than already knowing every detail of a company’s technology.
“When you go work at a company right out of college, most people will not expect you to understand how their chemical process works at a glance,” he said. “However, they will expect you to understand how to learn their process quickly by applying the basic principles of chemical engineering to familiar unit operations.”
The ability to enter a new technical area, identify the essential pieces, and quickly build a working understanding has been one of the most valuable skills he carried from UCLA into industry.
“The ability to look at a new process and quickly learn the basics of how it works is a skill that will set you apart,” Vito said.
From his first refinery visit as a UCLA student to designing processes for hydrogen, renewable fuels, and carbon capture, Vito’s career reflects the breadth of opportunities available to chemical engineers and the lasting value of a strong foundation in engineering fundamentals.