Three chemical engineering professors at The University of Texas at Austin will receive prestigious awards in October from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The honored professors are Thomas F. Edgar, Adam Heller and Grant Willson.
Dr. Edgar will receive the Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education. Dr. Edgar said he felt humbled.
“If you look at the people who have won this award, they were really giants in the profession,” he said. Dr. Edgar holds the George T. and Gladys H. Abell Chair in Engineering.
The criteria for the Lewis award include being successful as a teacher, writing “superior” textbooks and other scholarly publications, contributing to developments in industry, and being a leader of a department or equivalent group. Dr. Edgar has held leadership positions in many organizations, including the university’s College of Engineering, AIChE, and the American Automatic Control Council. Dr. Edgar has co-authored two books that have had a major impact on the teaching of modeling, automatic control and optimization.
Dr. Heller won the Award in Chemical Engineering Practice, reserved for an AIChE member who innovated or implemented a research development. Dr. Heller co-developed FreeStyle, a glucose-monitoring device for diabetics. FreeStyle is about the size of a keychain and determines blood sugar levels using only 300 nanoliters of blood, making the blood sampling painless. Abbott Diabetes Care, the company producing FreeStyle, is in the process of securing FDA approval for the Freestyle Navigator, a patch-sized device, worn to continuously monitor blood sugar and send the results to a wireless monitor, also co-developed by Heller.
“Adam has not been satisfied with the discovery and development of processes. He is driven to transform his findings into practical, life-changing products for the benefit of mankind,” said John G. Ekerdt, who nominated Heller for the award. Heller is a research professor and professor emeritus in chemical engineering.
The Arthur Dehon Little Award for Chemical Engineering, which Dr. Willson won, is the second award he’s received this summer for the same invention. The award is for “contributions to a successful innovation of commercial or societal importance,” and Willson won it for his part in the development of chemically amplified photoresists, light sensitive materials used in semiconductor chip fabrication. The photoresists are spread on silicon wafers. They then undergo a photographic process imposing images of the circuitry wiring on the silicon. This process results in generation of tiny “trenches” that eventually hold the actual wiring. The development allowed companies to create smaller, faster and cheaper chips and the technique is now the standard for chip production used throughout the world. Willson’s breakthrough also won him this year’s designation as a “Hero of Chemistry” from the American Chemical Society.
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