Elections for the 2012–13 Season Executive Committee will be held on April 19, 2012

Can­di­dates:
Chair-elect: Carl Men­ning, Vlad Niko­lakis
Trea­sur­er: Haiy­ing Chen, Parag Shah
Direc­tors: Yaritza Lopez, Chuck Coe
Bio­graph­i­cal sketch­es of the can­di­dates

Chair-elect

Carl Men­ning is cur­rent­ly a Research Engi­neer at DuPont at the Cor­po­rate Research cen­ter in Wilm­ing­ton, DE, where he is work­ing on cat­a­lyst devel­op­ment for renew­ably-sourced mate­ri­als. He obtained his under­grad­u­ate degree in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Min­neso­ta-Twin Cities in 2003. Fol­low­ing a short peri­od in indus­try, he received his Ph. D. in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware under the guid­ance of Jing­guang Chen in 2009 with a focus on bimetal­lic cat­a­lysts for PEM fuel cells. He has indus­tri­al expe­ri­ence in a vari­ety of fields includ­ing con­sumer foods, petro­le­um-based prod­ucts, inor­gan­ic pig­ments and renew­ably-sourced mate­ri­als. Carl is cur­rent­ly the Pro­gram Chair of the Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia and was the Arrange­ments Chair from 2006 to 2008.

Dr. Vladimiros Niko­lakis (Ph.D., Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing, Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts Amherst, 2001) joined the Catal­y­sis Cen­ter for Ener­gy Inno­va­tion at Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware as a Senior Research Asso­ciate in 2011. Before that he was a Prin­ci­pal Researcher at the Insti­tute of Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing & High Tem­per­a­ture Chem­i­cal Process­es (FORTH/ICE-HT), Greece. His cur­rent stud­ies are focused in the field of het­ero­ge­neous catal­y­sis for the con­ver­sion of bio­mass feed­stocks to plat­form chem­i­cals or fuels. His research inter­ests also include the fields of zeo­lite crys­tal­liza­tion; zeo­lite mem­brane syn­the­sis, eval­u­a­tion and devel­op­ment of nov­el char­ac­ter­i­za­tion tech­niques. He has pub­lished more than 30 arti­cles in peer reviewed sci­en­tif­ic jour­nals and he has more than 50 pre­sen­ta­tions in sci­en­tif­ic con­fer­ences. He has served the pro­fes­sion­al com­mu­ni­ty as a mem­ber of the orga­niz­ing com­mit­tee of sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic con­fer­ences (once as a con­fer­ence chair), and as review­er of research arti­cles or pro­pos­als.

Treasurer

Dr. Hai-Ying Chen is a Prod­uct Devel­op­ment Man­ag­er at John­son Matthey Inc., Emis­sion Con­trol Tech­nolo­gies, in Wayne, Penn­syl­va­nia. He is respon­si­ble for devel­op­ing advanced cat­a­lysts for exhaust emis­sion con­trol. Hai-Ying Chen received his Ph. D. degree in Chem­istry from Fudan Uni­ver­si­ty, Shang­hai, Chi­na. He has been a mem­ber of the Philadel­phia Catal­y­sis Club since 2000, and served the club as Sec­tary, Pro­gram Chair, Direc­tor, and Chair.

Parag Shah is a Research Chemist at PQ Cor­po­ra­tion and is involved in devel­op­ing improved sil­i­ca-based sup­ports, new poly­olefin cat­a­lysts and process/product devel­op­ment for emerg­ing cat­a­lyst tech­nolo­gies. In 2008 he received his PhD in Chem­i­cal and Bio­mol­e­c­u­lar Engi­neer­ing from Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia under the guid­ance of Prof. Ray­mond J. Gorte. His the­sis work focused on inves­ti­gat­ing the ther­mo­dy­nam­ic prop­er­ties of met­al-oxide cat­a­lysts. Parag earned his Bachelor’s degree in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing from the Insti­tute of Chem­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Bom­bay (India), and sub­se­quent­ly did a Mas­ters in Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente (The Nether­lands), with empha­sis on Process Devel­op­ment and Design. He has been a mem­ber of the Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia since 2004, and served as Sec­re­tary since 2010–2011 sea­son.

Directors

Yaritza M. López is cur­rent­ly a Senior Appli­ca­tion Engi­neer at John­son Matthey in the Heavy Duty Diesel depart­ment in Audubon, PA. She is work­ing on the tech­ni­cal appli­ca­tions of new cat­a­lysts for emis­sion con­trol for heavy duty diesel engines. She joined JM in Sep­tem­ber 2010, after fin­ish­ing her Post-Doc at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Car­oli­na (USC), where she focused her research of NOx reduc­tion cat­a­lysts for gaso­line emis­sions. She obtained her PhD degree from USC in 2009, her dis­ser­ta­tion was focused on the syn­the­sis, char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and kinet­ic eval­u­a­tion of den­drimer-derived monometal­lic and bimetal­lic cat­a­lysts for hydro­gena­tion and NOx reduc­tion reac­tions. Yaritza was mem­ber of the South­east Catal­y­sis Soci­ety and she is an active mem­ber of the North Amer­i­can Catal­y­sis Soci­ety (2007 – present). She has been part of sev­er­al pro­fes­sion­al and grad­u­ate stu­dent com­mit­tees. She was co-chair on fun­da­men­tals of catal­y­sis ses­sion in AIChE and she par­tic­i­pat­ed as judge of AIChE under­grad­u­ate stu­dent poster (2010). She was also vice-pres­i­dent of the chem­i­cal engi­neer grad­u­ate orga­ni­za­tion at USC (2008–2009) and part of the grad­u­ate stu­dent recruit­ing com­mit­tee at USC from 2005 to 2009.

Chuck Coe is cur­rent­ly a Vis­it­ing Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor in the Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing Depart­ment of Vil­lano­va Uni­ver­si­ty. After obtain­ing his PhD in inor­gan­ic chem­istry from Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty, Chuck joined the Chem­i­cal Addi­tives divi­sion of Air Prod­ucts and Chem­i­cals Ear­ly in Chuck’s career he trans­ferred to the cor­po­rate research group at the com­pa­ny head­quar­ters where he devel­oped an exten­sive exper­tise in mol­e­c­u­lar sieve sci­ence. Before retir­ing from Air Prod­ucts, Chuck was named a strate­gic tech­nol­o­gist for the Cor­po­ra­tion and pro­vid­ed inter­nal con­sul­ta­tion on a broad range of mate­ri­als char­ac­ter­i­za­tion issues involv­ing cat­a­lysts and adsor­bents. Chuck has been an active mem­ber of the Philadel­phia and NY Catal­y­sis Clubs for over thir­ty years. Ear­li­er in his career he served as an offi­cer in the Philadel­phia Catal­y­sis Club. He received the 2010 Catal­y­sis Club of Philadel­phia Award. Since retir­ing, Chuck has joined the Chem­i­cal Engi­neer­ing fac­ul­ty at Vil­lano­va as a Vis­it­ing Assis­tant Pro­fes­sor and is shar­ing his knowl­edge with the next gen­er­a­tion of engi­neers and sci­en­tists.