Dr. John G. Ekerdt has won the Joe J. King Professional Achievement award, which is reserved for “faculty showing exemplary leadership in the engineering profession.”
As head of the Department of Chemical Engineering for eight years, Ekerdt’s devotion to hiring faculty and administration helped boost the department into the top seven rank. Also from 1991 to 2002, Ekerdt was associate director for the university’s Science and Technology Center for the Synthesis and Analysis of Electronic Materials.
He has also taken several leadership positions within the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). In 1980 he helped found a South Texas Section of the organization. Later, serving as an AIChE division chair, he helped integrate the area of electronic materials processing into the larger chemical engineering professional organization.
Ekerdt’s research has improved the quality of silicon alloy films used for microelectronics. He also developed screening procedures and rules for engineering precursor material that allow engineers to deposit compound semiconducting material, or other materials, in a reproducible way.
He holds the Dick Rothwell Endowed Chair in Chemical Engineering.
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About UT's Cockrell School of Engineering:
The University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering ranks among the top six public engineering schools in the United States. With the nation's fourth highest number of faculty elected members of the National Academy of Engineering, the School's more than 7,000 students gain exposure to the nation's finest engineering practitioners. Appropriately, the School's logo, an embellished checkmark used by the first UT engineering dean to denote high quality student work, is the nation's oldest quality symbol. The School maintains a Web site at http://www.engr.utexas.edu