Johannes Schwank, James and Judith Street Professor of Chemical Engineering, was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). He has served AIChE in a variety of capacities during his career. He has been a session chair or vice-chair at many meetings, especially during the last 10 years, he has reviewed articles for over 30 years for the AIChE Journal, and was on the board of the AIChE Detroit Local Section from 1999-2011. This October, he will be the session co-chair for catalysis and reaction engineering at the Ninth Sino-US Joint Chemical Engineering Conference in Beijing, China, co-sponsored by AIChE and NSF.
Schwank has made numerous significant contributions to the advancement of chemical engineering and specifically to the field of heterogeneous catalysis. The unifying theme of his research has been to find correlations between the microstructure of catalysts and the macroscopic reactivity behavior. He has also left his mark as advisor and mentor of more than forty graduate and postdoctoral students, many of whom have become very successful as catalysis researchers in academia.
Besides his work in heterogeneous catalysis, he is the organizer and leader of REFRESCH, a large team of faculty and students engaged in the development of new models for food, water, and energy security in resource-constrained settings, with major efforts underway in Gabon, Africa, and also in Kazakhstan.
