ChE Professors Excel in Awards and Funding

May 8, 2008

Louis Thibodeaux (BS 1962, MS 1966, PhD 1968), the Jesse Coates Professor in Chemical Engineering and the 2008 recipient of the Charles E. Coates Memorial Award, was honored at the annual Coates Banquet held on May 8, 2008, at Boudreaux’s in Baton Rouge. At the banquet, Thibodeaux delivered a lecture entitled “Environmental Chemodynamics—The Last Chemical Design Element.

”The Charles E. Coates Memorial Award is given annually to a member of either the American Chemical Society (ACS) or American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE) who has made outstanding contributions to the professions of chemistry or chemical engineering, the ACS or AIChE, and the Baton Rouge community. Established in 1957 by the Baton Rouge chapters of ACS and AIChE, the award honors the legacy of Dr. Charles E. Coates. Coates, who was head of the LSU Department of Chemistry from 1893 to 1937, and dean of the Audubon Sugar School from 1908 to 1931, was the third PhD to join LSU’s teaching faculty. He also spearheaded the creation of the Department of Chemical Engineering at LSU and served as its first department chair from 1908-1936.

Thibodeaux earned all three ChE degrees, and a dual BS PETE, at LSU. Upon receiving his PhD in 1968, he joined the faculty of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He returned to LSU in 1984 as a professor in ChE and Director of the newly-established Hazardous Waste Research Center, where he served until 1995. His research areas focus primarily on chemodynamics and hazardous waste transport. He has received numerous awards and accolades throughout his career for his work in chemodynamics and is considered one of the field’s foremost experts. A Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Thibodeaux frequently lends his expertise as a consultant on both government and private review boards, as well as on study panels related to the study of environmental chemistry, and he was awarded the 2007 Engineering Faculty Professionalism Award by the Louisiana Engineering Society.

The Gordon A. & Mary Cain Department of Chemical Engineering recently signed a new $750,000, three-year contract with Chevron for research on catalysts for conversion of synthesis gas to higher value oxygenates. LSU Associate Professor Jerry Spivey, working with Jim Goodwin from Clemson University and George Roberts of North Carolina State University and LSU Adjunct Professor, and a team of students, will focus on improving the yield of desired products using advanced computational and catalyst methods.

Michael Benton and Francisco Hung, both assistant professors in ChE, are each the recipient of Pfunds from the Louisiana Board of Regents for 2008, designed to greatly assist each in building his lab and research programs at LSU. Both Benton and Hung joined the department as assistant professors in August 2007.

Benton’s Pfund project, entitled “Synthesizing Novel Yeast Strains for Biofuel Production,” will engineer S. cerevisiae strains to optimize ethanol production from biomass. By monitoring gene expression patterns, Benton and his research team will identify the yeast genes most important in the fermentation of xylose or glucose under typical industrial reaction conditions. Once these genes are known, they can vary their expression level in novel yeast strains, conferring the ability to simultaneously utilize both 5-carbon and 6-carbon sugars in biomass streams. These enhanced cell lines will greatly increase the industrial utility of yeasts, making ethanol production much more economically and environmentally feasible and greatly reducing dependence on fossil fuels.

“Molecular modeling of adsorption of small biological molecules on ordered mesoporous carbons,” Hung’s Pfund project, seeks to understand how certain properties of carbons (e.g., pore size and morphology, surface chemistry) affect the adsorption of biomolecules. Hung’s working hypothesis is that carbons with specific properties will strongly physisorb a given protein without inducting large structural changes, which would eventually lead to the denaturation of the protein. To test this hypothesis, Hung and his team will perform Molecular Dynamics simulations of a small protein and carbons with different features to estimate the protein-substrate interactions and establish how the structural properties of the biomolecules are affected upon adsorption. Such a fundamental knowledge is relevant for potential applications of these systems in protein separations, delivery of peptide-based drugs, and controlled immobilization of enzymes for biocatalysis and biosensors.

Article by Melanie McCandless, College of Engineering, 225-578-3242, mmonce@lsu.edu

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