Lively Wins AIChE’s 2020 Colburn Prize Associate Professor Ryan P. Lively is the 2020 winner of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ (AIChE) Allan P. Colburn Award for Excellence in Publications by a Young Member of the Institute. Each year, the award recognizes outstanding progress in the field of chemical engineering by one researcher in any area of chemical engineering research who is within 12 years of completing their PhD. One of the most prestigious awards an early career chemical engineer can receive, the Colburn award recognizes significant advances and contributions to the field of chemical engineering.
Lively was honored for his broad contributions to separations science. He has worked to improve adsorptionbased gas separations and has led the experimental and conceptual development of organic solvent reverse osmosis separations. “Ryan’s work is making a real difference to world-scale problems faced by the chemical process industry. This award is a wonderful recognition of his impressive achievements.” Professor David Sholl, the John F. Brock III School Chair of ChBE
Innovations in Lively’s work span discovery of new materials,
fundamental understanding of adsorption and mass-transfer mechanisms, and development of practical separation systems, including advances in materials manufacturing. He has also served the chemical engineering community through his service as a board member on the North American Membrane Society, and as an associate editor of Chemical Engineering Science and an editor at the Journal of Membrane Science. Lively joined the faculty at Georgia Tech in 2013. In the last seven years, his research team has produced over 90 papers that have been cited more than 5,000 times according to Google Scholar. Sholl notes that Lively is a “Georgia Tech triple threat,” holding undergraduate and PhD degrees from ChBE and now a faculty position here. He is the John H. Woody Faculty Fellow.
Grover Named ADVANCE Professor at Tech Martha Grover was recently named the ADVANCE professor for Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering – a role focused on supporting the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities in academia. Established with a 2001 NSF Institutional Transformation Grant, ADVANCE professors are nominated by their respective deans to serve as their college’s leading advocate for gender and race equality. There is an ADVANCE professor in each of Georgia Tech’s six colleges. Professor Grover, who is the associate chair of graduate studies for ChBE, says: “I began my faculty career at Georgia Tech in 2002, as the ADVANCE program was getting started. I was fresh out of my PhD, and excited to have the opportunity to start my career as an
assistant professor.” She adds, “Though not unaware of gender bias and dynamics, I had until that point tried to keep my blinders on and focus on my academic performance, building my research portfolio and credentials.” Out of f40 professors in ChBE at the time, there was only one other woman on the faculty (the total is now 11). “While I appreciated the support of my male colleagues, I enjoyed the networking and social opportunities with the women at the ADVANCE events, and I participated actively,” Grover says. Through ADVANCE program-
ming, she learned about scientific, quantitative data on unconscious bias. “Learning about this data was affirming and uplifting for me,” Grover says. As an ADVANCE professor, Grover aims to pay particular attention to the needs of Black women on campus (not only faculty, but also staff and students). Martha Grover quotes Martin Luther King Jr. in explaining her guiding principle with the ADVANCE program: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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