PodCAT

Prof. Ya-Huei (Cathy) Chin is Professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Advanced Catalysis for Sustainable Chemistry at the University of Toronto. She joined the University in 2011, after receiving her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D.) degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. Before then, she was a research engineer (2000-2002) and then senior research scienti...

Dr. Javier Guzman is the Executive Vice President for Research at the Tecnológico de Monterrey Education Group in Mexico. He oversees the research enterprise for three university systems (Tecnologico de Monterrey (ranked #1 in Mexico and #4 in Latin America), TecSalud (academic and research hospital system), and TecMilenio (stackable and flexible competency-based education model)). Before joining...

Prof. Juliana Carneiro is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University, where she leads the Carneiro Research Group. Her research examines how catalyst structure and interfacial chemistry govern heterogeneous catalytic and electrochemical reactions, with the goal of developing more efficient and resilient technologies for sustainable chemical production and energy conversi...

Raffaella is a Full Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering and Head of the Laboratory of Nanochemistry for Energy (LNCE) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). She leads a multidisciplinary research program in which the synthesis of well-defined and tunable catalytic materials enables a fundamental understanding of catalytic phenomena and guides the development of design...

We are thrilled to welcome Dr. Cathleen Crudden back to PodCAT for our 60th episode! Dr. Crudden is a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair, a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Queen's, and the Founder and Scientific Director of the Carbon to Metal Coating Institute (C2MCI). She is a Research Professor in Nagoya, Japan, where she runs a satellite lab. Crudden has secured over $72M in research grants...

Karthish Manthiram is the Bren Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, and the Exeuctive Officer for Chemical Engineering at Caltech. The Manthiram Lab is focused on the development of electrified catalysts for the sustainable synthesis of molecules that go into constructing the physical world, including plastics and fertilizers, using renewable feedstocks. Karthish received his B.S. in C...

Prof. Michael S. Wong, Ph. D, is the Tina and Sunit Patel Chair in Molecular Nanotechnology and professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University. He is also professor in the Departments of Chemistry, of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and of Materials Science and Nano Engineering. He received his education and training at Caltech, MIT, and UCSB. He is Re...

Prof. Steven Chavez is an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. His long-term career goal is to develop tools and model systems to advance mechanistic understanding of dynamics in heterogenous catalysis. Prior to UCLA, he was previously an Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University.  Prior to Stanford, he r...

Professor Christopher W. Jones is the John F. Brock III School Chair and Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Dr. Jones leads a research group that works on materials, catalysis and adsorption.  In catalysis, he has worked at the interface of homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, with recent work focusing on thermal heterogeneous catalysis.  Dr. Jones was the foundi...

Prof. Lars Grabow is the Dan Luss Professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 2008, followed by postdoctoral appointments at the Technical University of Denmark and Stanford University. His expertise is the application of electronic structure...

Prof. Brandon Bukowski is an Assistant Professor in the department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. He holds BS and PhD degrees in Chemical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Purdue University, respectively. At Purdue he was advised by Jeffrey Greeley where he modeled the kinetics of zeolite and supported nanoparticle catalysts using Density F...

Prof. Madelyn Ball is an Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Michigan State University. Prof. Ball received her B.S. from University of New Hampshire and Ph. D in Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin Madison under James Dumesic before conducting postdoctoral studies under Prof. Christopher Jones at Georgia Tech. Prof. Ball's research interests are in...

Prof. Christopher Paolucci is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He is a "Double Domer" having completed his B.S. and Ph. D in Chemical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Afterwards, he was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. The Paolucci group focuses on computer simulations of chemical reactions at interfaces.   Re...

Prof. Tibor Szilvási ( seal-vase-she) studied chemical engineering, chemistry, and physics at the Budapest University of Technology, Hungary, where he completed his PhD degree in 2016. After a postdoctoral stay at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with Prof. Manos Mavrikakis he joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at The University of Alabama as a tenure-track assistant p...

Prof. Jingguang Chen is the Thayer Lindsley Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University, with a joint appointment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He received his B.S. degree from Nanjing University and his PhD degree from the University of Pittsburgh. After finishing an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellowship in Germany, he joined the Exxon Corporate Research Laboratory for...

Prof. Carlos Morales-Guio is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. His group develops reactor-centric methods that decouple transport from intrinsic kinetics and translate insights to scalable, model-informed electrolyzer designs. Carlos received his B. Eng. degree in Chemical Engineering from Osaka University and his M.S. and Ph. D. in Chemistr...

Prof. Linsey Seitz is an Associate Professor in the Chemical and Biological Engineering Department at Northwestern University. She received her B.S. (2010) in Chemical Engineering from Michigan State University, supported with a full ride scholarship. She earned her M.S. (2013) and Ph. D. (2015) in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University supported as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and later...

Prof. Marcel Schreier received his B.S. degree in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from EPFL and his M.S. degree in Chemical and Bioengineering from ETH Zurich. During his studies, Schreier worked on Li-Ion Batteries at BASF and investigated Fischer-Tropsch refining mechanisms at the University of Alberta. His master's research was performed in the laboratory of Sossina Haile at Caltech, where h...

Prof. Ariel L. Furst is an Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. Her lab combines biological, chemical, and materials engineering to solve challenges in human health and environmental sustainability. They develop technologies for implementation in low-resource settings to ensure equitable access to technology. She completed her Ph. D. in the lab of Prof. Jacqueline K. Barton at the C...

David Flaherty is the Thomas C. DeLoach Jr. Endowed Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.   Prof. Flaherty completed a BS in Chemical Engineering at UC-Berkeley and completed his PhD at University of Texas Austin at the interface between chemical engineering and physical chemistry studying thin film deposition and chemical reaction...

Originally from Egypt, Prof. Omar Abdelrahman grew up in the United Arab Emirates, where he developed his passion for chemical engineering and went on to receive his BSc in Chemical Engineering (American University of Sharjah, 2011). Driven by the desire to be involved in scientific research, Omar moved to upstate NY for his PhD in chemical engineering at Syracuse University (2016), followed by a...

Prof. Rajamani (Raj) Gounder received his BS in Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin in 2006, where his interest in catalysis was sparked while performing research under Jim Dumesic. He received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC-Berkeley in 2011 under the guidance of Enrique Iglesia, and then completed a postdoctoral stay at Caltech with Mark Davis. He started his faculty care...

Prof. Michele L. Sarazen is an Assistant Professor at Princeton University in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and an associated faculty with the DOE Princeton Plasma Physic Laboratory. Her research group couples synthetic, kinetic, and theoretical investigations of porous crystalline materials as catalysts and adsorbents for sustainable fuel and chemical production with an em...

Prof. Carsten Sievers is a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. Prof. Sievers' expertise spans heterogeneous catalysis, reactor design, applied spectroscopy, and the synthesis and characterization of solid materials. By bridging fundamental science with applied engineering, his research aims to develop innovative catalytic processes for producing fuels...

Dr. Bob McCabe is the former Program Director of the NSF CBET-Catalysis program after retiring in February 2025. Bob's interest in catalysis began as an undergrad student in chemical engineering at the University of Houston through a combination of catalytic reaction engineering, an elective survey course in catalysis, and a senior design project involving the Andrussow process for HCN catalyzed b...