Hal Alper of UT Austin to Deliver AIChE’s Professional Progress Award Lecture

Hal S. Alper, the Kenneth A. Kobe Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), will present the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' (AIChE's) Andreas Acrivos Professional Progress Award Lecture for 2024. The 2023 recipient of AIChE's Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering, Alper will discuss his research during the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting on Tuesday, October 29, in San Diego, California.

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 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.

Hal 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.

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, among other activities. He is a chemical engineering alumnus of the University 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.

Additional information about the 2024 AIChE Annual Meeting is available at www.aiche.org/annual.

About AIChE: AIChE is a professional society of more than 60,000 members in more than 110 countries. Its members work in corporations, universities and government using their knowledge of chemical processes to develop safe and useful products for the benefit of society. Through its varied programs, AIChE continues to be a focal point for information exchange on the frontier of chemical engineering research in such areas as nanotechnology, sustainability, hydrogen fuels, biological and environmental engineering, and chemical plant safety and security. More information about AIChE is available at www.aiche.org.