Events

Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
10:35am

Dr. James Sheehan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of Alabama. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 2019 under the advisement of Dr. Phillip E. Savage. His research group focuses on advancing lignocellulosic biorefining and supercritical fluid modification of polymer composites. Dr. Sheehan serves on the Early Career Board of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering and is the Secretary and Programming Committee Chair for the AIChE Forest & Plant Bioproducts Division. He is a recipient of the ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award, and his research program has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA). His work aims to integrate fundamental chemical engineering with green chemistry principles to enable scalable, sustainable technologies for biomass conversion and modification.

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Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
10:35am

Miguel A. Modestino is the Director of the Sustainable Engineering Initiative and the Donald F. Othmer Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at New York University (NYU). He also serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Industrial Decarbonization at Tecnologico de Monterrey (Mexico). Miguel obtained his B.S. in Chemical Engineering (2007) and M.S. in Chemical Engineering Practice (2008) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley (2013). From 2013-2016, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He is a winner of the MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Award in Latin America (2017) and Globally (2020), the ACS Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award (2018), the NSF CAREER Award (2019), the Global Change Award from the H&M Foundation (2016), and the TED Idea Search Latin America (2021). His research group at NYU operates at the intersection of advanced chemical manufacturing technologies, high throughput experimentation and its integration with AI. He is also the co-founder of Sunthetics, a startup developing machine learning solutions to accelerate R&D in the chemical industry, and Metrotech Energy, a startup developing flexible energy storage solutions for power resiliency.

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Capone Learning Auditorium (CBEB 001)
10:35am

Prof. Michael Timko is the William B. Smith Professor and Department Head of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Dr. Timko’s main research interests involve the study of new technologies for production of sustainable fuels, chemicals, and materials. He is author of more than 130 peer-reviewed journal articles and a recipient of a National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, the American Chemical Society’s Glenn Research Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Prof. Timko is on the editorial boards of Sustainable Chemistry and Global Challenges; co-inventor on five patents; and scientific founder of River Otter and on the scientific advisory board of ChemCycle. He is co-PI of an NSF Research Training Grant on the combination of chemical sciences, data sciences, and social sciences for advancing the circular economy. Prior to joining WPI, Dr. Timko was a Principal Engineer at Aerodyne Research Inc. and a Research Engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His training is in chemical engineering and chemical physics at The Ohio State University (B.S.), MIT (M.S. and Ph.D.), and Harvard University (post-doc).

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