A global team of editors and board members at Industrial & Engineering Chemistry (I&EC) Research, a journal published by the American Chemical Society, scoured the world to identify influential, early career researchers for their annual “Influential Researchers” list.
The 2018 Class of Influential Researchers, revealed this week, features 29 talented scientists and researchers drawn from eight different countries. The individuals – all with less than 10 years in their research career – were chosen on the basis of the quality and impact of their work.
Two of the spots went to Cullen College of Engineering faculty: Jeffrey Rimer, the Abraham E. Dukler Professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and Lars Grabow, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.
Rimer is renowned for his groundbreaking research in the broad field of crystallization. His work has led to the development of novel drugs for kidney stones – marking the first advance in kidney stone therapy in a span of 30 years – and malaria. He has oil and gas industry-related projects that target scaling in pipes and increasing the efficiency of catalysts. Also, he is the principal investigator on a $800,000 U.S. Department of Energy-funded research project studying the corrosion behavior of glass containers often used to store nuclear waste. Its goal is to find solutions to reduce or avoid the degeneration of the containers.
He has won numerous awards, including the 2018 Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research from the Welch Foundation, 2017 FRI/John G. Kunesh Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the 2016 Owens Corning Early Career Award and the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Award in 2012. In addition, Rimer has received multiple teaching and research excellence awards from UH.
Grabow, who is world-renowned for computational research in the field of catalysis, has won millions of research dollars to find safer, cheaper and more effective catalysts for a variety of industrial processes and environmental applications.
He serves as the chair of the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering (CRE) division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, as vice-chair of the Southwest Catalysis Society and is on the international advisory board of the prestigious journal ChemCatChem.
Grabow’s work has earned him several awards, including the NSF CAREER Award in 2015, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2014 and the ICC Young Scientist Award in 2012, along with a UH Excellence in Research, Scholarship or Creative Activity Award in 2017.
I&EC Research published a virtual special issues showcasing papers from the honorees. Rimer’s paper is titled “Diverse Physical States of Amorphous Precursors in Zeolite Synthesis” and Grabow’s paper is titled “Activity Trends for Catalytic CO and NO Co-Oxidation at Low Temperature Diesel Emission Conditions.”
To read the papers, visit: https://pubs.acs.org/page/iecred/vi/influential-researchers-2018
To see a complete list of the 2018 Influential Researchers, visit: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.iecr.8b04315?ref=infResVirtualIssue