Celebrating ACS Engineering Au’s 2023 Rising Stars in Chemical Engineering

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We wish you a very happy 2024! We are delighted to welcome in the new year, and the fourth volume of ACS Engineering Au, with a new virtual special issue highlighting the 2023 Rising Stars in Chemical Engineering. The early career researchers featured in this virtual special issue were nominated by the Editorial Advisory Board of ACS Engineering Au, due to their outstanding contributions thus far, and their potential to influence the future directions of their respective fields. The work in this virtual special issue includes valorisation of biomass, electrochemistry, environmental engineering, complex fluids, and reactive multiphase flows.

We are delighted to introduce the inaugural cohort of ACS Engineering Au’s Rising Stars in Chemical Engineering:

Dr. Marie-Josée Dumont is a full Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Laval University, Québec and holds a Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Biomass Valorization. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in food engineering (Université Laval, 2003), a master’s degree in chemical engineering (Université Laval, 2005), and a Ph.D. in bioresource engineering at the University of Alberta in 2010. Subsequently, she gained experience working in government, industry, and academic roles where she was responsible for the production of polymers and biobased chemicals at laboratory and pilot scales. She has developed expertise in the chemical and biological characterization and transformation of a wide range of bioresources into specialty and commodity products. More information about Prof. Dumont and her research can be found here: https://www.gch.ulaval.ca/departement-et-professeurs/professeurs-et-personnel/professeurs/fiche/marie-josee-dumont-1028.

Dr. Dumont’s Rising Stars Review is titled “Desorption Strategies and Reusability of Biopolymeric Adsorbents and Semisynthetic Derivatives in Hydrogel and Hydrogel Composites Used in Adsorption Processes”. Review DOI: 10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00022.

Dr. Lea Hildebrandt Ruiz is an Associate Professor in the McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering and at the Center for Energy and Environmental Resources at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Hildebrandt Ruiz holds a B.S. with Honors in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Environmental Track, 2006) and a Ph.D. from the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy, Carnegie Mellon University (2011), where she was advised by Prof. Neil Donahue and Prof. Spyros Pandis. She was a postdoctoral fellow in Atmospheric Chemistry at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (2011–2012), advised by Prof. Jim Smith. Her research focuses on air quality engineering and the effects of physical and chemical processing of pollutants on human exposure in indoor and outdoor environments. Current specific research interests include tropospheric chlorine chemistry, air quality impacts of unconventional oil and gas development, air quality in New Delhi, India and indoor air quality impacts of disinfection. For more information, see her research group website: https://sites.utexas.edu/h-group/

Dr. Hildebrandt Ruiz’s Rising Stars Article is titled “Emissions from Hydrogen Peroxide Disinfection and Their Interaction with Mask Surfaces”. Article DOI: 10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00036.

Dr. Seyed Mohammad Taghavi holds the Canada Research Chair in Modeling Complex Flows and is currently a Professor at Université Laval. In 2011, he received his Ph.D. from the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia (UBC). He has around three years of postdoctoral experience in analyzing complex flows at UBC, University of Michigan, and McGill University, where he held the Banting and Tomlinson Postdoctoral Fellowships. His research interests revolve around complex flows, fluid mechanics, interfacial flows, hydrodynamic stability, and non-Newtonian fluid mechanics. More information about Prof. Taghavi and the Laboratory of Complex Fluids Research group can be found here: http://www2.gch.ulaval.ca/smtag/index.html.

Dr. Taghavi’s Rising Stars Review is titled “Modeling of Shear Flows over Superhydrophobic Surfaces: From Newtonian to Non-Newtonian Fluids”. Review DOI: 10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00048.

Dr. Mauro Bracconi is Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. He graduated with honors in Chemical Engineering in 2014 and received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering cum laude from the Politecnico di Milano in 2018. He has been visiting scholar at the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science at the University of Manchester (2017), in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware (2019) and, as IDEA League Exchange Fellow, at the Chemical Engineering Department of the Delft University of Technology (2023–2024). His research activity regards the fundamental analysis and the intensification of catalytic processes and chemical reactors using multiscale modeling techniques. His works focus on the development of advanced simulation methodologies using a combined approach of computational fluid dynamics and first-principles kinetics also leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.

Dr. Bracconi’s Rising Stars Article is titled “Increasing Computational Efficiency of CFD Simulations of Reactive Flows at Catalyst Surfaces through Dynamic Load Balancing”. Article DOI: 10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00066.

Dr. Helge Stein is a Digital Catalysis Professor at Technical University of Munich, and is a leading expert in advancing AI and robotics guided discovery, characterization, and upscaling of materials for catalysis and secondary batteries. His innovative methods involve self-developed robotic systems for experimental data collection, algorithmic planning and evaluation, and semantically searchable data management. The overarching goal is to establish a decentralized global Material Acceleration Platform (MAP) that covers the entire spectrum from material discovery to production. Prof. Stein studied physics at Georg-August University of Göttingen from 2008 to 2013. He achieved his doctorate with summa cum laude in 2017, specializing in high-throughput methods in mechanical engineering at Ruhr University Bochum. Following this, he conducted research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) until 2020, when he assumed a tenure track professorship in applied electrochemistry at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). His approach combines experimental techniques, data science, and robotics for planning and evaluating advanced data collection. The vision is to create a globally accessible MAP that streamlines discovery and proliferation to large-scale production of materials, emphasizing effects that originate from materials and interfaces acting in systems. You can find more information about the research group on their webpage: https://www.ch.nat.tum.de/digicat/.

Dr. Stein’s Rising Stars Article is titled “Nonlinear Potentiodynamic Battery Charging Protocols for Fun, Education, and Application”. Article DOI: 10.1021/acsengineeringau.3c00047.

We thank these outstanding researchers for their contributions and are delighted to showcase them as ACS Engineering Au’s 2023 Rising Stars in Chemical Engineering. We look forward to seeing their research developing in the coming years!

This year will also see the launch of two topical virtual special issues in ACS Engineering Au, the first on sustainable energy and decarbonization, guest edited by Professor Matteo Maestri (Polytechnic University of Milan) and Professor Rajnish Kumar (Indian Institute of Technology, Madras). The second virtual special issue will focus on materials design using experimental and computational approaches, guest edited by Professor Paul Dauenhauer (University of Minnesota), Dr. Steve Arturo (The Dow Chemical Company) and Professor Anant Govind Rajan (Indian Institute of Science).

We would like to emphasize the broad scope of ACS Engineering Au, which includes advances in data, methods, models, processes, and products. We encourage submissions on new research methods and results from translational research that facilitate laboratory to market transition. Full details of the journal scope are available on our journal homepage.

As we start our fourth year, we recommit ourselves to developing ACS Engineering Au with our community of authors, reviewers, and readers, to become the premier fully open access chemical engineering journal. We are always open to hear your suggestions regarding the journal; we consider all feedback carefully to ensure our journal is serving our community well. We hope that you enjoy this issue on the “2023 Rising Stars in Chemical Engineering”.