John O’Connell is Professor Emeritus at the Univ. of Virginia. He has been active in AIChE for more than 50 years. An AIChE Fellow for more than 25 of those years, he served as Fellows Chair from 2004 to 2011, and became founding Chair of the Fellows Council. John is currently the Fellows Council Secretary and Editor of the Fellows Newsletter. He served on AIChE’s Board of Directors from 2015 through 2017.
John has been involved in all levels of Institute programming — as a chair of many meeting sessions, Chair of Group 1 and Area 1A (Engineering Sciences and Fundamentals; Thermodynamics and Transport Properties), and as a member of the Executive Board of the Program Committee. He was Local Arrangements Chair for the 1978 Miami Beach Annual Meeting, and Meeting Program Chair of the 1989 San Francisco Annual Meeting.
For 27 years, he was advisor to AIChE student chapters — which were selected as National Outstanding Chapters 11 times. John was honored as AIChE’s Outstanding Chapter Advisor in 1982 and 2013. Other AIChE contributions include service as Director of the Education Div. and the Virtual Local Section, as well as several cycles in the Future Faculty Mentoring program. He was an editor for Fluid Phase Equilibria and Chair of the Publications Board for Chemical Engineering Education. He has held sabbatical positions in Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, and New Zealand. John has a BA from Pomona College, an SB and SM in chemical engineering from MIT, and a PhD in chemical engineering from the Univ. of California, Berkeley.