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by Gordon Ellis -
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In this series, ChEnected is introducing readers to the recipients of AIChE’s 2024 Institute and Board of Directors’ Awards. As AIChE’s highest honors, the awards’ recipients are nominated by the community and voted upon by the members of AIChE’s Awards Committee.
The Alpha Chi Sigma Award recognizes outstanding accomplishments in fundamental or applied chemical engineering research, and is sponsored by the Alpha Chi Sigma Educational Foundation and the Alpha Chi Sigma Fraternity.
The recipient of the 2024 Alpha Chi Sigma Award is Dr. Athanassios Z. (Thanos) Panagiotopoulos, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. He is being recognized “for novel approaches and transformative insights into the thermodynamics, structure, and dynamics in complex mixtures, especially electrolyte solutions, colloidal crystals, and intrinsically disordered proteins.”
Dr. Panagiotopouolos and the other Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients will be honored at the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting, October 27–31 in San Diego, California.
About Thanos Panagiotopoulos
Thanos Panagiotopoulos’s research group develops and applies theoretical and computer simulation techniques to study the properties of fluids and materials. His team focuses on molecular-based models that explicitly represent the main interactions in a system. These models can be used to predict the behavior of materials at conditions inaccessible to experiment and to gain a fundamental understanding of the microscopic basis for observed macroscopic properties, using large-scale numerical computations.
His Alpha Chi Sigma Award nominators emphasize that a distinguishing feature of Panagiotopoulos’s work is that he not only applies innovative computational methods to study systems ranging from electrolyte solutions, to colloidal crystals, to intrinsically disordered proteins, but that he also substantially advances those methods. In that regard, he is developing new algorithms, force fields, and analytical schemes, enabling simulations that were previously difficult to control, along with insights that were previously unattainable.
In addition to his research, Panagiotopoulos served as chair of Princeton’s Chemical Engineering Department from 2016–2022. Before joining Princeton, he was a postdoctoral fellow in physical chemistry at the University of Oxford, and he held faculty positions at Cornell University and the University of Maryland.
Thanos is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of more than 335 technical papers and the undergraduate textbook “Essential Thermodynamics” (2011).
He received an undergraduate degree from the National Technical University of Athens and earned his PhD from MIT, both in chemical engineering.
ChEnected will be introducing all the 2024 Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients. Visit ChEnected regularly to meet this year’s honorees in this series.