Alum Dr. Feng He and Graduate Students Vasudev Haribal & Kaihang Shi Received Research Awards

Dr. Feng He (Ph.D. ’15) received the George Klinzing Best Ph.D. Award from the Particle Technology Forum of AIChE. The Award “recognizes an outstanding dissertation by an individual who has earned a doctoral degree”, and is highly competitive.

The dissertation can be in any discipline in the physical, biomedical or engineering sciences, with particle science and engineering as its focus, and the recipient must have received a doctoral degree within the three calendar years prior to the year the award is given.

Dr. He was a member of Professor Fanxing Li’s research group. His thesis title is Novel Redox Processes for Carbonaceous Fuel Conversion.

Graduate student, Vasudev Haribal, was the second runner-up for the Best Student Paper at the 43rd Clearwater Clean Energy Conference in Clearwater, Florida. The award was based on, “the high quality of work in the manuscript and superior presentation of ‘Chemical Looping Oxidative Dehydrogenation: A Greener Route to Ethylene Production’.” Research assistant professor, Luke Neal, was a co-author on this paper.

According to Vasudev’s thesis advisor, Professor Fanxing Li, “the scope of this annual conference includes new and exciting technologies currently on the horizon and excels as one of the premiere conferences on coal and related technologies, continuing to grow in size and scope since 1975. It presents an extensive overview of emerging, evolving, and innovative technologies, fuels and/or equipment in the power generation industry.”

Students from Canada, China, Germany, Korea, Sweden and the U.S. participated in the Award competition.

Vasudev also received a 2018 Travel award from the AIChE Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division.

Kaihang Shi, a Ph.D. student in Professor Keith Gubbins’ research group, won Best Poster Award at two international conferences this summer:

• Characterization of Porous Materials 8 (CPM-8) in Delray Beach, Florida
• FOMMS 2018 (Fundamentals of Molecular Modeling and Simulation) in Delavan, Wisconsin.

These are two of the most important international conferences in the area of molecular modeling and simulation, each held every 3 years.