AIChE is proud to recognize the remarkable contributions of women chemical engineers who are shaping the future of the profession. This Women’s History Month, we honor the women who have achieved the distinguished title of AIChE Fellow—a testament to their leadership, expertise, and dedication to advancing chemical engineering.
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 must have been a member of AIChE for at least 10 years.
Please see below to learn more about the women who were elected as AIChE Fellows in 2024.
Virginia A. Davis
Virginia A. Davis is the Daniel F. and Josephine Breeden Professor in the Dept. of Chemical Engineering at Auburn Univ., where her leadership has emphasized bringing together people from different organizations and backgrounds to create opportunities and accomplish common goals. Davis’ research in soft matter uses rheological properties to develop structure-process-property relationships for nanomaterial and polymer films, fibers, and printed structures. She is a longtime leader in AIChE’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Forum, and has served as a programming chair for carbon nanomaterial sessions at AIChE conferences. She has also co-edited a book on nanotechnology.
Kishori Deshpande
Kishori Deshpande is a Senior Research Scientist in Catalyst and Process R&D for Dow Packaging and Specialty Plastics. Her research focuses on catalyst manufacturing assets, process design and reactor scale up for sustainable processing of new builds, and developing a fundamental understanding of gas phase polyethylene reactions. She has applied her expertise in sustainable and energy-efficient processing across Dow’s businesses. As Chair of AIChE’s Process Development Div. (PDD), she leads a webinar series covering topics including AI, multiscale engineering, and process intensification, and she launched PDD’s “Meet the Industry
Candidates” poster session at the AIChE Annual Meeting.
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.
Roseanne M. Ford
Roseanne M. Ford is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Univ. of Virginia (UVA). Her research focuses on the transport of chemotactic bacteria in porous media and its impact on bioremediation, and she has more than 75 publications to her credit. As UVA’s department chair and a university administrator, she has had an important impact on undergraduate and graduate education. She has also served the profession through her involvement in professional organizations such as AIChE, on editorial boards for journals, advisory committees for other chemical engineering departments, and in activities to broaden student participation in the profession.
Martha Grover
Martha Grover is a Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she is Associate Chair for Graduate Studies and the ADVANCE Professor in the College of Engineering. Her research program is dedicated to understanding, modeling, and engineering the self-assembly of atoms and small molecules to create larger-scale structures and complex functionality. Her approach draws on process systems engineering, combining modeling and experiments in applications dominated by kinetics, including surface deposition, crystal growth, polymer reaction engineering, and colloidal assembly. She joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2003, and she was the Meeting Program Co-chair for the 2023 AIChE Annual Meeting.
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).
Zhaohui Tong
Zhaohui Tong is an associate professor and James C. Barber Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has actively conducted research and taught in the areas of sustainable chemistry and bioresource technologies since 1998, and has established an innovative research program on the food-energy-water nexus. Her related research synthesis and self-assembly of multi-functional sustainable materials, catalytical conversion of renewable resources (e.g., biomass) to biochemicals and aviation fuels, and AI-based biorefinery process control and catalyst design. She has served as a leader of AIChE’s Forest and Plant-based Bioproducts Div.
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