Georges Belfort, PhD, holds an endowed Institute Professorship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI; Troy, NY), and conducts research on membrane-based purification of mRNA (vaccines), in vitro production and purification of biofuels, and organic solvents. He was educated in chemical engineering at the Univ. of Cape Town, South Africa, where he received his BS degree, and at the Univ. of California at Irvine, where he earned an MS and PhD in engineering. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2003; chosen by AIChE as one of the “100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era” as part of the Institute’s Centennial Celebration; and has chaired the managing board of AIChE’s Society for Biological Engineering (SBE) since 2014. He is a past president and co-founder of The North American Membrane Society. He also served on the scientific advisory board for the Max Planck Institute, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Alexander Grass Center for Bioengineering at Hebrew Univ., Israel. He has been a member of AIChE since 1966. Besides winning several notable scientific awards from AIChE and the American Chemical Society, he has supervised more than 100 graduate students and postdocs.