Richard V. Calabrese is Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park. Before joining Maryland in 1981, he worked for Pickard, Lowe & Garrick and Stevens Institute of Technology. He received his BS degree from the University of Rochester and his MS and Ph.D degrees from the University of Massachusetts.
Rich’s expertise is in the areas of turbulent mixing and multiphase flow, with emphasis on particle-eddy interactions, drop dispersion & coalescence, prediction & measurement of particle size distribution, and measurement & CFD simulation of velocity fields in stirred contactors and other process equipment. He is the author of more than 70 publications, has given more than 300 presentations, and is a consultant to numerous chemical and pharmaceutical companies. Prof. Calabrese is director of the High Shear Mixing Research Program at Maryland, an industrial consortium with about 15 member companies.
Prof. Calabrese has received AIChE’s NAMF Award for Sustained Contributions to Mixing Research & Practice, and was elected to Tau Beta Pi as an eminent engineer. He was a Fulbright Senior Scholar and SERC Visiting Fellow at the University of Birmingham (UK), a Visiting Scientist in the Particle Science & Technology group at the DuPont Experimental Station, and a Technical Adviser in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy at DOE, working on issues related to carbon capture and storage. Over the past 10 years, he has provided input to DOE, BNI and WRPS on design matters related to slurry transport and mixing phenomena at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant.
Rich is a Fellow of the AIChE and currently serves as chair of its Chemical Technology Operating Council (CTOC). He is a founding member, Treasurer and Past President of the North American Mixing Forum, and has served as NAMF’s national programming chair and as the Chair of MIXING XV (NAMF’s 1995 biennial conference). Rich has contributed several chapters to NAMF’s Handbook of Industrial Mixing. He has also served as a Subject Editor for Chem. Eng. Res. & Design, the journal of the European Federation of Chemical Engineers.