Ronald R. Chance is the Executive Vice President of Engineering at Algenol Biotech LLC in Fort Myers, Florida.
In his first research position at Allied-Signal (now Honeywell), Dr. Chance helped lead scientific and inventive programs related to time-temperature indicators, underpinning the company TempTime Corporation — which for 30 years has supplied life-saving devices to ensure vaccine integrity.
During his 20-year in management at Exxon Corporate Research, his contributions included co-invention of ExxonMobil’s SpeedPass customer identification system. As a Distinguished Scientific Advisor at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering, he promoted energy and environmentally friendly separation processes involving membranes and adsorption processes.
While on the faculty at Georgia Tech, Ronald led a joint Georgia Tech-Algenol team in the first peer-reviewed life cycle analysis that showed the potential of algal-based biofuels to achieve 70% carbon footprint relative to gasoline. This work led to approval of Algenol’s pathway for an algal-based biorefinery, and in 2015 Ronald led the engineering construction and downstream operations team for the first photobioreactor-based algal biorefinery to produce fuel grade ethanol biofuel.
He has documented his work in 175 articles and 30 patents.