Hal S. Alper, Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering #1at the Univ. of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), will present the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ (AIChE’s) Andreas Acrivos Professional Progress Award Lecture for 2024. As the 2023 recipient of the Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering, Alper will discuss his research during the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting on Oct. 29 in San Diego, CA.
The Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering recognizes the contributions of a chemical engineer in their early career. The award is endowed by the AIChE Foundation and named in honor of Andreas Acrivos, Professor Emeritus at The City College of New York, who pioneered the field of fluid dynamics and is an influential leader in the chemical engineering profession. The associated lecture is a highlight of each year’s AIChE Annual Meeting, a foremost educational forum for chemical engineers working in research and development.
In his Professional Progress Award lecture, entitled “Engineering Biology to Develop a Taste for Waste,” Alper will discuss how advances in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology are improving the valorization and remediation of waste, and presenting new routes for environmental stewardship and sustainable industrial bioproducts.
Alper’s research
Alper is the Principal Investigator in UT Austin’s Laboratory for Cellular and Metabolic Engineering, where his research group applies and extends the approaches of related fields such as synthetic biology, systems biology, and protein engineering. His research is documented in more than 150 articles and eight book chapters, and he has delivered nearly 200 invited lectures at institutions worldwide.
More on Alper
A Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and a member of the National Academy of Inventors, Alper has organized conferences for AIChE’s Society for Biological Engineering and International Metabolic Engineering Society. He is a chemical engineering alumnus of the Univ. of Maryland, College Park, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his BS and PhD, respectively. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and at Shire Human Genetic Therapies.
ChEnected will be introducing all the 2024 Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients. Visit ChEnected regularly to meet this year’s honorees in this series.