Robert Davis, UVA’s William Mynn Thornton Professor of Chemical Engineering, won the prestigious AIChE R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering. Winners of the award, first presented in 1966, are researchers who have most influenced the field of chemical reaction engineering.
As the 2017 Wilhelm Award winner, a Session of the 2018 AIChE Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh will be held in Davis’ honor on Monday, Oct. 29. The session features talks by invited speakers.
Davis is also the recipient of the Emmett Award of the North American Catalysis Society, the NSF Young Investigator Award, the DuPont Young Professor Award, the Union Carbide Innovation Recognition Award, and the UVA Rodman Scholars Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has co-authored more than 150 publications, delivered more than 100 invited lectures at conferences, academic departments and industrial research groups, and co-authored more than 100 additional presentations at technical meetings.
Davis co-leads UVA’s partnership with MAXNET Energy, an initiative of Germany’s Max Planck Society to advance research on new, renewable, environmentally friendly and economical energy sources. Researchers from UVA and the eight Max Planck Institutes within the MAXNET Energy Consortium are working collaboratively on developing processes for the clean and efficient production of energy. Research efforts focus broadly on new methods to use solar energy to produce fuels and new catalyst technologies for the clean conversion of natural gas — including renewable bio-gas — to liquid fuels for the transportation sector.