Two engineering professors received the University Co-op's highest research awards.
Nicholas Peppas, professor of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering and pharmaceutics, received this year’s University Co-op Career Research Excellence Award in honor of maintaining a superior research program across many years. Peppas, who holds the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in Engineering, was noted as being widely recognized as the father of modern drug delivery and its leading researcher, inventor and pacesetter. His research contributions span many areas including drug delivery, biomaterials, biomolecular engineering, mass transfer, polymerization kinetics and reaction engineering, and polymers physics.
Benny Freeman won this year’s University Co-op Best Research Paper Award with a paper published in Science on a rubbery material that can purify hydrogen efficiently for fuel cells and oil refining. Freeman, the Kenneth A. Kobe Professor in Chemical Engineering, received the award for the paper “Plasticization-Enhanced H2 Purification Using Polymeric Membranes.” Also contributing to the paper were graduate student Haiqing Lin, now at Membrane Technology and Research, Elizabeth van Wagner, and Research Triangle Institute collaborators Lora Toy and Raghubir Gupta.
The University Co-op is a not-for-profit corporation owned by the students, faculty and staff of the University of Texas at Austin.
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About the Cockrell School of Engineering:
The Cockrell School ranks among the top ten engineering programs in the United States and aspires to move into the top five. With the nation's fourth highest number of faculty members elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the Cockrell School's more than 7,000 students work with many of the world's finest engineering educators and researchers. This environment prepares graduates to become engineering leaders and innovators working for the betterment of society.