Van Ness Award Lectures

The Van Ness award is made in recognition of the achievements of the late H.C. Van Ness, Institute Professor Emeritus at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and is presented annually to honor a chemical engineer who has made seminal contributions to the profession.

Professor Van Ness received his B.S. and M.S. Degrees from the University of Rochester, where he was also an instructor for two years. After another two years with the M.W. Kellogg Company, he attended Yale University, receiving the D. Eng. in 1953. Following four years as an Assistant Professor at Purdue University, he came to Rensselaer in 1956. He has been a Visiting Professor at Kings College, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Danmarks Tekniske Hojskole, Lyngby, Denmark. Professor Van Ness is a Fellow of the AIChE, the recipient of the 1988 W.K. Lewis Award (AIChE), and was the IUPAC Rossini Lecturer in 1994.

Contributions by Professor Van Ness to the literature of chemical thermodynamics reflect his interest in experiment. He and his students devised experimental methods which have served as prototypes for world-wide application to the accurate and rapid measurement of primary physical properties. In addition to experiments they developed efficient techniques for data reduction, fundamental to the correlation and generalization of thermodynamic properties for application to chemical process design.

Professor Van Ness is also well-known for Introduction to Chemical-Engineering Thermodynamics, the most widely used chemical engineering textbook of all time. The seventh edition, with coauthors J.M. Smith and M.M. Abbott, was published in fall 2004. This book has served as a standard text for undergraduates for 55 years. (see extended Biographical Sketch of Hendrick C. Van Ness here)

THE LECTURE SERIES

Awardee and affiliation at the time of award

1991 H.C. Van Ness, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Joe M. smith, University of California, Davis

1992 William J. Koros, University of Texas, Austin

1993 Eduardo D. Glandt, University of Pennsylvania

1994 Frances H. Arnold, California Institute of Technology

1995 Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos, Cornell University

1996 Buddy D. Ratner, University of Washington

1997 T. Kyle Vanderlick, Princeton University

1998 Nitash Balsara, Polytechnic University of New York

1999 James B. Rawlings, University of Wisconsin, Madison

2000 Karen K. Gleason, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2001 Eric S.G. Shaqfeh, Stanford University

2002 Nicholas L. Abbott, University of Wisconsin, Madison

2003 George Georgiou, University of Texas, Austin

2004 Samir Mitragotri, University of California, Santa Barbara

2005 David Schaffer, University of California, Berkeley

2006 Michael Tsapatsis, University of Minnesota

2007 Thomas M. Truskett, University of Texas, Austin

2008 Patrick S. Doyle, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

2009 Rachel A. Segalman, University of California, Berkeley

2010 Abraham Stroock, Cornell University