Institute News – February 2018

Meet Some of AIChE’s Recently Elected Fellows

Fellow candidates are nominated by their peers, and must have significant chemical engineering practice (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.

Fernando J. Aguirre, P.E., is Senior Vice President, Contracts and Services, at Heat Transfer Research, Inc. (HTRI). During his 27+ years at HTRI, he also served as Director of Research; Director of Marketing and Technical Training; Director of Marketing and Business Development; Vice President, Sales and Business Development; and Senior Vice President, Global Sales. He received his undergraduate chemical engineering education from Universidad T. F. Santa Maria, Valparaíso, Chile, and his MS and PhD in chemical engineering from the Univ. of Pittsburgh. He is a leader of AIChE’s Management Div. and the Dallas Section, and is a licensed Professional Engineer in Texas.

Frances H. Arnold is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry, and Bioengineering at the California Institute of Technology, where her work focuses on protein engineering by directed evolution, with applications in energy, chemicals, and medicine. She co-founded the companies Gevo, Inc., to make fuels and chemicals from renewable resources, and Provivi, Inc., to develop nontoxic modes of agricultural pest control. She is a recipient of the Millennium Technology Prize and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and is a member of all three U.S. National Academies. She earned her PhD in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley.

Linda J. Broadbelt is the Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor and Associate Dean for Research in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern Univ., where she chaired the Dept. of Chemical and Biological Engineering from 2009 to 2017. Her extensive AIChE activities include programming and leadership roles in the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Div., the Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum, the Nominating Committee, the Meeting Quality Task Force, and the Executive Board of the Program Committee. She is an associate editor of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research.

Efstratios N. Pistikopoulos is the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Distinguished Research Professor at Texas A&M Univ.’s Energy Institute. His research focuses on sustainable energy systems and the environment; multiparametric programming and model predictive control; and the integration of design, control, and scheduling with applications in smart manufacturing and personalized healthcare. Prior to Texas A&M, he was a chemical engineering professor at Imperial College London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He earned a chemical engineering diploma from Aristotle Univ. of Thessaloniki and a PhD in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon Univ.

W. Vincent Wilding is professor and Associate Dean of Engineering and Technology at Brigham Young Univ. (BYU), where he has also chaired the chemical engineering department and has developed courses addressing engineering ethics, chemical process safety, and environmental engineering. He has served as BYU’s AIChE student chapter advisor and as a leader of the Great Salt Lake Section. Since 1998, he has been co-principal investigator for AIChE’s Design Institute for Physical Properties (DIPPR) 801 Project, Evaluated Process Design Data. He received BS and PhD degrees in chemical engineering from BYU and Rice Univ., respectively.

Timothy Zygula, P.E., is a senior process engineer with BASF...