Gaden Honored with 2009 NAE Russ Prize

American Institute of Chemical Engineers has recognized the UVa Student Chapter as one of its 15 Outstanding Chapters for 2008. Congratulations to last year's President, Elyse McKenney and her Executive Board!

It is truly excellent in this Centennial year for both UVa-CHE and AIChE, that our student leaders and members have been judged among the very best. The competition for this award is quite fierce, but our officers and members have shown dedication and creativity in providing valuable professional service and social activities.

There will be a plaque awarded to the Chapter President and Advisor during the Student Program at the AIChE Centennial Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, November 14-17.

The design of a sustainable water-purification system for Venda, South Africa by 3rd-year CHE students Ana Jemec and Eric Harshfield has been selected for 2008 funding by the Davis Projects for Peace. Kathryn Wasserman Davis, on her 100th birthday in 2007, chose to celebrate by committing $1 million a year as an invitation to undergraduates at the American colleges and universities in the Davis United World College Scholars Program to design grassroots projects that they implement during the summer. The projects judged to be the most promising and do-able are funded at $10,000 each. The objective is to encourage and support today’s motivated youth to create and try out their own ideas for building peace.

Jack Hudson, Wills Johnson Professor of Chemical Engineering, has been elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. This is among the highest professional distinctions awarded to engineers. It honors those who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice or education, and to the pioneering of new and developing fields, making major advancements in traditional fields, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education. The citation honoring Jack is "For advances in the understanding and engineering of complex dynamic chemical-reaction systems."

John O'Connell's 70th Birthday celebrated with Festschrift and Symposium

Matthew Neurock the Alice M. and Guy A. Wilson Professor of Chemical Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2007 R.H. Wilhelm Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. The award recognizes an individual's significant and new contributions in chemical reaction engineering. The recipient is to have advanced the frontiers of chemical reaction engineering through originality, creativity, and novelty of concept or application. Matt was recognized specifically for his efforts in pioneering the application and development of quantum mechanical methods and atomistic simulations to catalysis and chemical reaction engineering practice. The Award consists of a plaque and $3,000, plus up to $500 for travel allowance to the presentation at the Honors Ceremony of the AIChE Annual Meeting.

Matt also received a large grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences program to support fundamental science projects nationwide for advancing hydrogen fuel technology through understanding catalysis over nanostructured materials via modeling of electrocatalysis for fuel cells. See UVa Research News.

The purpose of the Award is to recognize and encourage individual contributions (under the age of 45) in the field of catalysis with emphasis on discovery and understanding of catalytic phenomena, proposal of catalytic reaction mechanisms and identification of and description of catalytic sites and species.

The selection of Bob Davis marks the first time that faculty from the same university have received back-to-back awards. Matt Neurock won the last award in 2005.

Bob received the Emmett Award for “his pioneering contributions to the use of in-situ spectroscopic methods coupled with both steady-state and transient kinetic methods to elucidate how oxide supports and basic promoters alter the active catalytic sites for a variety of reactions, including the selective oxidation of hydrocarbons, acid/base conversions, and ammonia synthesis."

A distinguishing characteristic of Davis's research is its integration of multiple experimental techniques for characterizing heterogeneous catalysts and the kinetics of reactions occurring on their surfaces. Davis has employed a comprehensive set of spectroscopic tools including extended X-ray absorption fine structure, X-ray absorption near-edge structure, infrared, Raman, nuclear magnetic and electron spin resonance, adsorption microcalorimetry, electron microscopy together with steady state as well as transient kinetic analyses to determine the local electronic and geometric structure of the active site(s), the influence local environment, and the reactivity of novel supported catalysts under working conditions. This wide array of tools has enabled him to discover the fundamental features that control a wide range of important catalytic systems.

Bob will give a plenary lecture and be recognized at the North American Catalysis Society meeting in Houston in June 2007. See the write-up at UVa Research News.

John O'Connell, the Harry Douglas Forsyth Professor of Chemical Engineering, was selected for the 41st ConocoPhillips Lectureship in Chemical Engineering Education. The Award consists of $1,500 plus travel for presentations at Oklahoma State University. The title of John's talk was "Fundamentals: The Wellspring for Adapting to Technological Change". The principal lecture has been published in a pamphlet; contact John directly for a copy.

Roseanne M. Ford, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and associate vice president for research and graduate studies, received U.Va. Trigon Engineering Society’s third annual Thomas E. Hutchinson Faculty Award for dedication and excellence in teaching. The award is named in honor of the faculty advisor to the Trigon Society for many years. Trigon was established in the Engineering School in 1924. The Society involves men and women engineering students in service projects for both the University and the Charlottesville community.

The National Science Foundation established the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program in 1994 in recognition of the critical roles played by faculty members in integrating research and education, and in fostering the natural connections between the processes of learning and discovery. The CAREER program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers NSF’s most prestigious awards for junior faculty members, and which embodies NSF’s commitment to encourage faculty to practice, and academic institutions to value, integration of research and education. The intent of the program is to provide stable support at a sufficient level and duration to enable awardees to develop careers as outstanding teacher-scholars in the context of the mission of their organization. CAREER awards have a 5-year duration with a minimum award (including indirect costs) of $400,000.

David Green's award is for “Connecting the Wetting and Rheological Behaviors of Polymer Grafted Nanoparticles in Polymer Melts”. Many advanced composite materials contain silica nanoparticles dispersed in polymers with polymer “brushes” grafted to their surfaces. The fabrication conditions, ultimate properties, and gelation processes of these materials are related to the size, number, and distribution of the particles, as well as the density and type of brushes. Selection of optimal components and conditions for applications is best done with mathematical models based on theory and experiment. The overall goals are to provide benchmark data over wide ranges of parameters by utilizing our unique capabilities to synthesize novel grafting systems, to develop self-consistent mean field theories for comparison of predictions with experimental data on dispersions and rheology, and to expose young people to the science and engineering of nanotechnology.

Steve McIntosh's award is for "A Novel Approach to Catalysis for Next Generation Direct-Hydrocarbon Solid Oxide Fuel Cells". SOFCs utilize an oxygen anion conducting electrolyte that could operate on any combustible fuel supplied to the fuel electrode, the anode. Current SOFC anode materials work only on hydrogen. To efficiently utilize both traditional and bio-derived hydrocarbon fuels requires new oxide-based anodes with catalytic properties that are not well understood. The overall research goal is to understand the coupled ion transport and catalytic processes occurring in complex oxides, relate these to the material structure and composition, and lead the way to an important alternative source for electrical power. See the write-up at UVa Research News.

Erik Fernandez is co-leader of an effort to provide Chemical Engineering educational materials on biotechnology. As described in a feature in Chemical and Engineering News, October 15, 2007, p. 42 (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/education/85/8542education.html), Erik and Claire Komives of San Jose State University are creating a Bioengineering Educational Materials Bank (BioEMB) with funding from NSF. The project collects, creates, and reviews problems for use in ChE courses. So far, the focus is on material and energy balances, but problems relevant to other courses will be added as further funding becomes available. Browse to www.bioEMB.net to see what is available. Claire and Erik also organized a workshop at San Jose State last July to help faculty become comfortable with biology-related material.

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