Arthur Ragauskas | AIChE

Arthur Ragauskas

Governor’s Chair Professor in Biorefining
Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Tennessee

Arthur Ragauskas held the first Fulbright Chair in Alternative Energy and is a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Academy of Wood Science and TAPPI.  In 2014, he assumed a Governor’s Chair for Biorefining based in University of Tennessee’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, with a complementary appointment in the UT Institute of Agriculture’s Department of Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries and serves in the US Energy and Environmental Sciences Directorate, Biosciences Division, at ORNL. His research program is directed at understanding and exploiting innovative sustainable bioresources.  This multifaceted program is targeted to develop new and improved applications for nature’s premiere renewable biopolymers for biofuels, biopower, and bio-based materials and chemicals.  His Fulbright sponsored activities at Chalmers University of Technology were focused on the forest biorefinery and new biofuel conversion technologies.  Currently, Dr. Ragauskas manages a research group of graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows, a research scientist, and visiting scientists.  He is the recipient of the 2014 TAPPI Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award and the ACS Affordable Green Chemistry award and his students have won several awards, including the ACS graduate research award.