College of Engineering Dean Jennifer Curtis receives 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award from American Institute of Chemical Engineers
By Rachel Furtado, originally posted by the UC Davis College of Engineering.
Jennifer Sinclair Curtis, Dean of the College of Engineering, has received the 2019 Particle Technology Forum’s Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She is being recognized as an outstanding contributor to the field of particle technology as well as for her leadership in promoting scholarship, research, development, service and education in this field.
AIChE is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 60,000 members from more than 110 countries. AIChE aims to provide value as the global leader of the chemical engineering profession, the security of chemical engineers and as the foremost catalyst in applying chemical engineering expertise to meet societal needs.
“I feel very honored to receive this Lifetime Achievement Award as it represents a culminating, international recognition of my research advances, teaching initiatives and professional service in the field of particle technology,” said Curtis.
Curtis is a distinguished professor of chemical engineering and a Fellow of the AIChE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). She received a bachelor’s in chemical engineering from Purdue University and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University. She currently serves on the National Academies’ Board of Chemical Sciences and Technology and has served in many roles for the AIChE, specifically the Particle Technology Forum.
“My interest in chemical engineering was sparked by how application of the fundamentals of this discipline impact an extremely wide variety of industrial applications, many of which involve the flow of particulates,” said Curtis. “I am grateful to the AIChE and its Particle Technology Forum for providing an outstanding home for the field and those who are engaged in it.”
Curtis’ research focuses on the development and validation of particle flow models which have been extensively adopted by both commercial and open source Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software packages.
She was the first to partner with ANSYS Fluent to greatly expand the multi-phase simulation capability of the code which is used by 96 of the 100 biggest industrial companies in the world and over 40,000 customers. Her particulate flow models are also included in the CFD Research Corporation software package and the open-source CFD codes OpenFOAM and MFIX.
Curtis will accept her award and deliver a presentation on the “Flow Behavior of Cohesive and Aspherical Particles in Hoppers and Shear Cells” during the 2019 AIChE Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida in November.