Dr. Stratos Pistikopoulos, director of the Texas A&M Energy Institute and holder of the Dow Chemical Chair in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been awarded the 2021 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) Sustainable Engineering Forum Research Award — an annual award presented for basic or applied research results relative to the sustainability of products, processes or the environment. This award recognizes significant technical contributions to research and development activities.
“Engineers like Stratos Pistikopoulos are in the forefront of advancing and implementing a wide variety of clean, renewable energy systems that will serve, not only the present generation, but generations of the future,” said Texas A&M Interim Vice President for Research Jack Baldauf. “We are fortunate to have a researcher with his experience, expertise and accomplishments leading our energy institute at Texas A&M.”
Pistikopoulos is also course director of the Master of Science in Energy program, director of the Data Sciences Core of the Texas A&M Superfund Research Center and a principal investigator at the RAPID Institute on intensified process fundamentals, co-leading the modeling and simulation focus area. Before joining Texas A&M, he was a professor of chemical engineering at Imperial College in London and director of its Centre for Process Systems Engineering. He earned his doctoral degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Pistikopoulos has authored or co-authored over 550 major research publications in the areas of modeling, control and optimization of process, energy and systems engineering applications, 16 books, 33 book chapters and four patents. He is a co-recipient of the prestigious MacRobert Award from the Royal Academy of Engineering, received the Sargent Medal from the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), United Kingdom (U.K.), and a recipient of the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award of Computing & Systems Technology Division (CAST)/AIChE.
Pistikopoulos is an elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the U.K., a fellow of AIChE and IChemE, and a member of The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas. He also holds the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University Politehnica of Bucharest, Romania, and the University of Pannonia, Hungary.
Founded in 1908, the AIChE is a nonprofit organization providing leadership to the chemical engineering profession. It is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals with more than 60,000 members in industry, academia and government from more than 110 countries.
The Sustainable Engineering Forum seeks collaborative work in programming and education objectives with other professional societies, both domestic and international. Specific focus areas of the forum include: using appropriate metrics for sustainability; developing approaches for designing products and processes that can be optimized to desired metrics criteria and that incorporate environmental and societal benefit factors and assessing impacts of resource use (energy, material and cost) on environmental and societal benefits of products, processes and services.