Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 2:00-3:00 PM EST

Gregory Stephanopoulos, Department of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Webinar slides

SBE Members can watch the archived webinar here for free!

About this Webinar

It is now clear that, for many reasons, corn has serious limitations as feedstock for biofuel production. While cellulosic biomass can potentially provide a sizable fraction of the US liquid fuel needs for transportation, current technologies must be further improved to realize cost-competitive processes for cellulosic biofuels. This presentation will discuss three major scientific and engineering challenges to this end. Identification of these challenges is based on an analysis of the biomass-to-biofuels value chain which allows assessment of present production costs as well as their sensitivity to changes at critical steps of the value chain. This exercise guides establishing of research priorities and also supports guarded optimism for the development of competitive processes for fuel production from renewable resources in the intermediate future. 

Greg Stephanopoulos Biosketch:

Dr. Gregory Stephanopoulos is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.  He received his B.S. Degree from the National Technical University of Athens, M.S. Degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. Degree from the University of Minnesota, all in Chemical Engineering.  He joined, upon finishing his doctorate in 1978, the Chemical Engineering Faculty of Caltech and in 1985 he was appointed Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT where he has been ever since. He served as Associate Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (1990-97) and member of the International Faculty of the Technical University of Denmark (2001-). He is also the Taplin Professor of HST (2001-), Instructor of Bioengineering at HMS (1997-), and the W. and H. Dow Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology.

Professor Stephanopoulos' current research focuses on metabolic engineering and its applications to the production of fuels, biochemicals and specialty chemicals, as well as mammalian cell physiology as it pertains to diabetes and metabolism. Professor Stephanopoulos has co-authored or –edited 5 books and ~300 papers and 25 patents. He has supervised 50 graduate and 40 post-doctoral students and is presently the editor-in-chief of the journal Metabolic Engineering; he also serves on the Editorial Boards of 7 scientific journals. He has been recognized with the Dreyfus Foundation Teacher Scholar Award (1982), Excellence in Teaching Award (1984), Technical Achievement Award of the AIChE (1984), PYI Award (1984), AIChE-FPBE Division Award (1997), M.J. Johnson Award of ACS (2001), and the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of the AIChE (2001). In 1992 he chaired the FPBE Division of AIChE and was elected a Founding Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.  In 2002 he received the Merck Award in Metabolic Engineering and was elected to the Board of Directors of AIChE. In 2003, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and in 2005 was awarded an honorary doctorate degree (doctor technices honoris causa) by the Technical University of Denmark. In 2007 he won the C. Thom Award from SIM and the Founders Award from AIChE.

Professor Stephanopoulos has taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses at Caltech and MIT and co-authored the first textbook on the subject of Metabolic Engineering. He introduced and directed three MIT summer courses on the subjects of Metabolic Engineering (1995-99), Bioinformatics (2000-04) and Biomass-to-Biofules Conversion (2008-).

He is presently directing a research group of approximately 25 researchers comprising ~15 graduate students, as well as post-doctoral fellows and visitors.