Institute News: August 2018

AIChE Introduces Some of its New Fellows

Fellow candidates are nominated by their peers, and must have significant chemical engineering experience (generally 25 years), have demonstrated significant service to the profession, and have been a member of AIChE for at least 10 years. Here are some of the recently elected Fellows. More Fellows will be introduced in future issues of CEP.

John Champion is Process Safety Technology Leader at Dow Chemical. He has accumulated more than 20 years of industrial experience, with his recent process safety work incorporating hazard and operability studies, layer of protection analyses, dispersion modeling, incident investigations, process safety management compliance, and other specializations. Prior to his process safety assignments, he held roles in manufacturing, engineering design, and technical management. He is a leader of AIChE’s Safety and Health Div. and chaired the Process Plant Safety Symposium in 2009. He has also chaired sessions and given numerous presentations at the Global Congress on Process Safety. He is a chemical engineering alumnus of the Univ. of Texas at Austin.

Linda Shi Cheng is R&D Director at Honeywell UOP, where her technical leadership has spurred advances in petrochemical and gas processing technology. Her work is documented in 15 U.S. patents, and she has been recognized by Honeywell UOP with the company’s patent of the year award, a team performance award, and the Honeywell Innovation Excellence Award. She has also received the Innovation Award from AIChE’s Separations Div. in recognition of her discovery, development, and commercialization of technologies for environmentally friendly products. She earned her PhD in chemical engineering at the State Univ. of New York at Buffalo.

Joanne Beattie Compton is an instructor at the Univ. of Rhode Island, where she teaches process safety management concepts and runs the senior lab course. She spent much of her industrial career at Bridgestone (Firestone) and GOJO Industries, during which time she became a leader of AIChE’s Akron (OH) Section. She currently chairs AIChE’s Rhode Island Section. She is also active in chemical engineering outreach — speaking to school groups about careers in engineering, judging science fairs, mentoring AIChE undergraduates, and offering volunteer support at AIChE’s regional and global paper competitions and Chem-E-Car^® competitions.

Edgar A. O’Rear is the Francis W. Winn Professor in Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering at the Univ. of Oklahoma, where he led the effort to establish a bioengineering program. His research has focused on biomedical engineering and surfactants, and has included pioneering work on accelerated thrombolysis with encapsulated clot-dissolving drugs, as well as the formation of thin organic films on a variety of substrates. This work is documented in over 150 publications and 11 patents. He has chaired many bioengineering sessions for AIChE, and served as president of the International Society of Biorheology.

Levi Theodore Thompson is the Richard E. Balzhiser Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Univ. of Michigan, where he directs the Hydrogen Energy Technology Laboratory and the Michigan-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation. He is co-founder and founding CEO of the company T/J Technologies, a developer of nanomaterials for advanced batteries; and co-founder of Inmatech, a company that commercializes low-cost, high-energy-density supercapacitors. He has served as a consulting editor of AIChE Journal, a chair of AIChE’s Chemical Technology Operating Council, and on AIChE’s Board of Directors. He earned his PhD in chemical engineering at the Univ. of Michigan.

Gregory Yeo is Chief Engineer at...