NASCRE 4 - Making Boundaries Malleable: Advancing Reaction Engineering through New Materials, Unique Chemistries and Advanced Computation

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

This grant is to provide travel support for junior US-based academic researchers to attend the 4th North American Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering (NASCRE 4) in Houston, TX, on March 10-13, 2019. The scientific theme for NASCRE 4 is "Making Boundaries Malleable: Advancing Reaction Engineering through New Materials, Unique Chemistries and Advanced Computation". Meeting the world's demands for energy, food, water and medicine - in a sustainable way, while protecting the environment - requires development of new technologies and advanced materials, and computational science and engineering is a key enabler of these developments. The theme of this symposium is to capture the essential role that chemical reaction engineering (CRE) plays in addressing these challenges with both an acknowledgement of the core of the discipline (inside the boundary) and future directions (moving the boundary). The symposium will feature communications of recent research on CRE fundamentals, enabling technologies, and advanced materials, such as catalysts, membranes and solar cells. The technical program of NASCRE 4 will consist of plenary lectures, keynote lectures, presentations by invited young researchers, the Amundson and Aris award addresses, and oral and poster presentations. The plenary speakers, keynote speakers and invited young researchers were selected based on input from the organizing and scientific committees, with the goal of covering the diverse topics of the Symposium: Novel Reactors and Materials for Reaction Engineering and Process Intensification, Advancing Reaction Engineering through High Performance Computation, Fundamentals of Reaction Engineering, and Applications of Reaction Engineering. A unique feature of NASCRE 4 will be two workshops available for conference attendees: 1. Women in Engineering: Let's Break the Boundaries. 2. Laboratory Reactors. The meeting participants will benefit from state-of-the-art plenary talks and keynote lectures by leading experts in academia and industry, by exchanging the latest advances on frontier research subjects, and by debating controversial points with their peers in the CRE discipline, including gender diversity. The meeting will also provide an excellent opportunity for interaction and cooperation among industrial and academic researchers. This will be especially beneficial to the young industrial and academic researchers who will attend. The organizers expect to attract many graduate students, including women and members of under-represented groups, to the meeting that they may otherwise be unable to attend. These students will have an opportunity to interact with each other and with experienced researchers in the field, which will positively influence their professional development. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.