Meet Some of AIChE’s Recently Elected Fellows

Candidates for AIChE Fellow are nominated by their peers and must have significant chemical engineering experience (generally 25 years). In addition, they must have demonstrated significant service to the profession and have been a member of AIChE for at least 10 years.

Please see below to learn more about some of AIChE’s recently elected Fellows. More Fellows will be introduced in future issues of CEP.

Daniel D. Burkey

Daniel D. Burkey is the Castleman Term Professor in Engineering Innovation and the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the Univ. of Connecticut’s College of Engineering. As Director of AIChE’s Education Div., he manages the Future Faculty Mentoring program, which pairs aspiring faculty with distinguished mentors from universities around the world. He was also the program co-chair for the 2022 ASEE/AIChE Summer School for Chemical Engineering Faculty. He earned his BS from Lehigh Univ. and his MS and PhD from MIT, all in chemical engineering. He holds an MA in educational research methods, measurement, and evaluation from the Univ. of Connecticut.

Connect with Daniel on AIChE Engage


Sourav Sengupta

Sourav Sengupta, a DuPont Laureate, has worked at DuPont for more than 30 years, with his current work focused on troubleshooting complex plant- and process-related problems in DuPont’s Water and Protection business. He has made contributions in catalyst synthesis, reaction engineering, and process development. These include a novel, on-site and on-demand catalytic hydrogen cyanide manufacturing process using induction heating; a commercial hydrogenation reactor technology to manufacture a key intermediate for an inhalation anesthetic; and a higher activity sulfuric acid catalyst. He is a member of AIChE’s Publications Committee.

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Laura P. Ford

Laura P. Ford is an associate professor of chemical engineering at the Univ. of Tulsa. She has served AIChE as a leader of the Student Chapters Committee, the Global Societal Initiatives Committee, the Education Div., and the planning committee for the ASEE/AIChE Summer School for Faculty. Her experiences teaching unit operations labs allowed her to co-lead the Education Div.’s virtual community of practice for labs, which supported faculty around the world during the pandemic. A board member of Chemical Engineering Education journal, she has also advised the Univ. of Tulsa’s AIChE Student Chapter, its award-winning Chem-E-Car team, and Tulsa’s Engineers Without Borders chapter.

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Eva Sorensen

Eva Sorensen is Professor and Head of the Chemical Engineering Dept. at University College London (UCL). Prior to joining UCL, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Sargent Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London. She is also a chartered engineer, a chartered scientist, a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), and a Fellow of the European Society for Engineering Education, among many affiliations. She is an editor and former Editor-in-Chief of Chemical Engineering Research and Design. In 2003, Sorensen was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

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Christopher P. Nicholas

Christopher P. Nicholas is the co-founder and President of Låkril Technologies, which commercialized a catalytic process for biobased acrylic production. Prior to founding a business based on sustainable catalysis, he worked for 15 years at Honeywell UOP, with a focus on inventing and catalytically testing new materials and processes. His particular areas of focus have included heterogeneous catalytic processes such as olefin oligomerization and alkylation, synthesis of inorganic materials (primarily metal oxides and zeolites), process engineering, molecular adsorption, and olefin metathesis. He is an inventor on more than 120 U.S. and foreign patents.

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Eric C. D. Tan

Eric C. D. Tan is a Senior Research Engineer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), where he specializes in developing renewable feedstock conversion pathways that produce low-carbon liquid hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals. He previously worked in industrial R&D, focusing on fuel processing technology, hydrogen production processes, and commercial fuel cell systems. He has contributed to the fields of heterogeneous catalysis, biorefining, process intensification, decarbonization, the circular economy, and sustainability. The current chair of AIChE’s Sustainable Engineering Forum, he earned his PhD in chemical engineering from the Univ. of Akron and an MS in sustainability from Harvard Univ.

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