Gregory Stephanopoulos

Gregory N. Stephanopoulos is the 2016 AIChE President and the W. H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. After obtaining his chemical engineering doctorate at Univ. of Minnesota, he taught at Caltech before joining MIT in 1985. His research focuses on metabolic engineering — the engineering of microbes to convert them to chemical factories for the production of fuels and chemicals. He has co-authored or edited five books, including co-authoring the first textbook on Metabolic Engineering, 450 papers, 50 patents, and supervised more than 150 graduate students and post-docs. He is editor-in-chief of Metabolic Engineering and Current Opinion in Biotechnology, and serves on the editorial boards of seven scientific journals and the advisory boards of five chemical engineering departments.

For his research and educational contributions, Prof. Stephanopoulos has been recognized with numerous awards, such as: Dreyfus award, Excellence in Teaching Award-Caltech, AIChE Technical Achievement Award, PYI from NSF, AIChE Food, Pharmaceutical, and Bioengineering (FPBE) Division Award, M.J. Johnson Award of ACS, Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering, the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of AIChE, Amgen Award in Biochemical Engineering. In 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and in 2005 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (doctor technices honoris causa) by the Technical University of Denmark. In 2007 he won the C. Thom Award from SIM and the Founders Award from AIChE and in 2010 the ACS E. V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry and the George Washington Carver Award of BIO. In 2011 he was selected as the Eni Prize winner for Renewable and non-Conventional Energy and was also elected as Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens. He was the 2014 recipient of the 2014 Walker award from AIChE. 

Prof. Stephanopoulos has served the professional organization of Chemical Engineers as chairman of Division 15, member of the Board of Directors and Chairman of the AIChE Society for Biological Engineering. In 2014, he was elected as 2016 President of AIChE and also received an honorary degree from the National Technical U. of Athens. In 2016 he was selected for the $1M Eric and Sheila Samson Prize on renewable transportation fuels and in 2017 for the Novozymes award for excellence in Biochemical Engineering. He is an AIChE Fellow and Trustee of the AIChE Foundation. He is also a Member of the National Academy of Engineering and Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens.