Election-2019
Officers for the Great Plains Catalysis Society will be elected in the weeks ahead. Voting starts on September 15th and will end on October 10th. All members are encouraged to vote!
The candidates for office are:
President-Elect (will be president in 2021) – Alan Allgeier, Bala Subramaniam
Secretary (2020-2021) – Juan Bravo-Suarez, Steven Crossley
Treasurer (2020-2021) – Luke Roling, Matt Wulfers
Directors (2020-2021) (three to be elected) – Placidus Amama, Bin Liu, Brent Shanks, Ricardo Prada Silvy, J.P. Tessonnier
Industrial Liaison (2020-2021) – Walter Alvarez, Paul Schoenecker
Communications Director (2020-2021) – Bin Wang
NACS Representative (2020-2024) – Daniel Resasco
The new offices will be announced by October 20th, 2019.
In the following you can find the bios of each candidate.
President-Elect (will be president in 2021) – Alan Allgeier, Bala Subramaniam
Alan Allgeier: I am an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Kansas and a founding Board member of the Great Plains Catalysis Society. I would be honored to serve as your President. Before academe, I spent two decades in industry and served as Chair of both the Catalysis Club of Philadelphia and the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society. Additionally, I held roles as Treasurer, Program Director, Board Member and Arrangements Chair. I will enthusiastically apply my past experiences to promote these initiatives: a) raise the visibility of catalysis research in the GPCS to a national audience and b) increase participation and sponsorship from industry.
Bala Subramaniam: Bala Subramaniam is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis at the University of Kansas. He is a Fellow of AIChE and the National Academy of Inventors. Subramaniam has served as President of the International Symposia on Chemical Reaction Engineering, Director of the Organic Reactions Catalysis Society and Chair of the 2018 Gordon Research Conference on Green Chemistry. He currently serves as GPCS secretary. Subramaniam’s vision is to (a) make GPCS a vibrant NACS node for promoting catalysis; (b) implement new avenues/opportunities to facilitate interactions among students, faculty and industry groups; and (c) increase/diversify GPCS membership.
Secretary (2020-2021) – Juan Bravo-Suarez, Steven Crossley
Steven Crossley: Steven is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at OU. Prior to joining OU in 2011, he carried out research at Phillips 66. His research focuses on catalysis with zeolites and reducible oxides. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2017 and was recently named Teigen Presidential Professor and Sam A. Wilson Professor. He has published over 40 journal articles (h index=19). He currently serves as membership chair of the GPCS and CATL division programming chair for the fall national meetings of the ACS. He looks forward to serving as secretary and helping the GPCS continue to grow.
Juan J. Bravo-Suárez: Juan is an assistant professor in the Chemical & Petroleum Engineering Department at KU. He held postdoctoral positions at AIST (Japan), UC-Berkeley, KU, and ADM and has been awarded the ACS-PRF doctoral new investigator and NSF-CAREER to advance in situ and operando spectroscopy in heterogeneous catalysis. He brings to the GPCS experience as symposia organizer/chair at ACS, AIChE, and NAM, and as an editor for Catalysts, Catalysis Today, and Topics in Catalysis. As an elected officer he expects to contribute to the GPCS goals of promoting and advancing the science of catalysis in the region and nationally.
Treasurer (2020-2021) – Luke Roling, Matt Wulfers
Luke Roling: He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at Iowa State University. He earned B.S. degrees in chemical engineering and mathematics from ISU in 2011, earned his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016, and was a postdoc at SUNCAT/Stanford University before joining ISU in 2018. His research focuses on the computational design of heterogeneous catalysts, with particular interests in understanding catalyst stability and condensed phase reactions. His primary goal as a GPCS officer would be to grow the organization’s membership through recruiting targeted at synergistic and related fields.
Matt Wulfers: He is currently an engineer at the Phillips 66 Research Center in Bartlesville, OK. A graduate of the Chemical Engineering department at OU, Matt has been a part of the Great Plains catalysis community for the past eleven years. Matt has previously served in numerous organizational leadership roles both within and outside of a work environment. As treasurer, Matt will strive to utilize existing industry relationships to fund the GPCS while working to build new relationships to promote the society as an asset for Great Plains catalysis science.
Directors (2020-2021) (three to be elected) – Placidus Amama, Bin Liu, Brent Shanks, Ricardo Prada Silvy, J.P. Tessonnier
Placidus Amama: He is currently an associate professor of chemical engineering and Tim Taylor Chair in Engineering at Kansas State University. He earned a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Yokohama National University (Japan), followed by postdoctoral research at Yale and Purdue universities. Before joining the faculty at K-State, he was a research scientist at AFRL. His research focuses on nanocarbons, heterogeneous catalysis, and environmental remediation. Amama's work has been recognized by several awards including Outstanding Assistant Professor Award in the College of Engineering (2016) and NSF CAREER Award (2017). His aspiration is to enhance the collaborative spirit among GPCS members.
Bin Liu: He is currently an Associate Professor at the Tim Taylor Department of Chemical Engineering at Kansas State University. Bin Liu received PhD in Chemical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in 2008. His research interests include applying first-principles methods to understand fundamental heterogeneous catalysis, electrochemistry for sustainable chemicals and fuels production, as well as materials engineering. He was named the Outstanding Tenure-Track Assistant Professor Award in 2016; and is currently the Wayne and Barbara Harms Key Stone Research Scholar (2019). He was actively involved in organizing the inaugural GPCS annual meeting held in Manhattan, KS in 2018.
Brent Shanks: Brent is an Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering and the Steffenson Faculty Chair in Chemical and Biological Engineering at Iowa State University. He is the Director of the Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC), formerly a NSF Engineering Research Center. After receiving his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology, he worked as a Research Engineer and Department Manager in the Catalyst Department at the Shell Chemical Company technology center in Houston, Texas. He joined the faculty at ISU in 1999 where his group’s research has primarily involved novel heterogeneous catalyst systems for converting biological-based feedstocks to chemicals.
Ricardo Prada Silvy: He has more 30 years of experience in executive leadership and technical positions and currently serves as member of the Board at PDVSA, CTO at Chasm Advanced Materials and affiliate lecturer at the University of Oklahoma. He holds a BS in Chemistry - Chemical Engineering from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and a Ph.D in Catalysis from the University of Louvain (Belgium). His main areas of expertise are in catalyst development and scaling-up for different refining, petrochemical and carbon nanomaterials production processes. Inventor of more than 30 International patents and published more than 110 scientific articles.
Jean-Philippe Tessonnier: JP is an Associate Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Iowa State University. He is also a faculty member of the Center for Biorenewable Chemicals (CBiRC) and an associate scientist of the U.S. Department of Energy Ames Laboratory. Prof. Tessonnier co-authored 80 publications that gathered more than 4,000 citations. He has served on the Executive Committee of the GPCS since 2017 and chairs the organizing committee for its 2020 Spring Symposium. His objective as a Director is to expand the GPCS membership by encouraging the participation of academic and industrial experts in homogeneous catalysis, theoretical catalysis, and electro-/photocatalysis.
Industrial Liaison (2020-2021) – Walter Alvarez, Paul Schoenecker
Paul Schoenecker: He is a Process Research Engineer at Zeolyst International in Kansas City, KS. His responsibilities include overseeing and documenting zeolite production trials and acting as a liaison between plant and pilot-scale development groups. Paul graduated with a B. S. in Chemical Engineering from Kansas State University in 2006. He obtained his Ph. D. in Chemical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012, where he researched Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) adsorption applications and synthesis scale-up for Krista S. Walton. He also worked in process development with activated carbons for automotive emission control, before coming to Zeolyst International.
Communications Director (2020-2021) – Bin Wang
Bin Wang: Bin is an Assistant Professor in the School of Chemical, Biological and Materials Engineering at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on computational simulations of the atomic and electronic dynamics in catalysis. He recently received funding from the DOE Early Career Research program. Serving as an inaugural officer of the GPCS since its establishment in 2017, he launched and updated the website, managed the twitter account, and prepared the newsletters. If elected, he will keep all the momentum as the communications director and make all the efforts to communicate with members, the catalysis society, and the general public.
NACS Representative (2020-2024) – Daniel Resasco
Daniel Resasco: Dan, PhD ChE Yale 1984, is a Professor and Gallogly Chair at OU, He specializes in heterogeneous catalysis and nanostructured materials for applications in energy, fuels, chemicals. he has been editor of the Journal of Catalysis and member of several editorial boards in heterogeneous catalysis. He has been author of 280+ publications and 40+ industrial patents. He has received ~ 25,000 citations, h-index 79. He has advised 110+ graduate students/postdocs. He is Chair of the ACS Catalysis Division, President Elect of GPCS, and current representative of GPCS in the Board of the North American Catalysis Society. Dan wishes to continue promoting and representing GPCS at the national level.