Rakesh Agrawal, a long-time member of the National Academy of Engineering with a deep background in various means of energy production, will join the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering this fall.
Agrawal comes to UH thanks to funding from the Governor’s University Research Initiative. He has been a professor for more than 20 years at Purdue, and previously, a long career in research and management at Air Products and Chemicals.
Agrawal was elected to the NAE, as well as the National Academy of Inventors and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers for more than three decades, including a three-year stint on the organization’s Board of Directors.
In 2010, he received a U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama for “an extraordinary record of innovations in improving the energy efficiency and reducing the cost of gas liquefaction and separation.”
Agrawal earned his doctorate in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a native of Dehradun, India and the oldest of three boys, he attributes much of his success to his parents, noting he was “very fortunate” to have them. They supported his pursuit of knowledge first as a science candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur and later at colleges in the United States.
“The night I left Dehradun, I had no idea that for the rest of my life I’d be surrounded by some of the smartest people Planet Earth has to offer,” he told interviewers for an article about being a medal recipient.
Agrawal has more than 130 U.S. patents, and his innovations in gas separation and liquification were implemented in hundreds of plants worldwide — helping to make LNG more practical and economical.
Recently, his research has been focused on energy production from renewable sources, especially solar. His research group has been investigating the printing of thin, inorganic solar cells. This also leads into other interests, like the electrification of chemical manufacturing for decarbonization.