Biography

Phil Westmoreland is a professor at North Carolina State University in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He was 2013 President of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). His degrees are in chemical engineering from N.C. State (BS '73), LSU (MS '74), and MIT (PhD '86). He was a Research Engineer in the coal-conversion program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1974-79, was on the faculty of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1986-2009, served as a program officer at the National Science Foundation in 2006-2009, and was Executive Director of the NC State Institute of Computational Science and Engineering from 2009-2014. Phil's research focuses on reaction kinetics and reaction engineering. Results are obtained from experiments, computational chemistry; on reactive-flow modeling; and on molecular-beam mass-spectrometry. The main technology driver is clean energy from fossil and biofuels, but he has also been involved with developing fire-safe polymers, hypergolic rocket fuels, and plasma processing of microelectronics. He is author or co-author of over 120 peer-reviewed publications and five books. He is a current trustee and past president (2004-06) of the educational nonprofit CACHE Corporation; was board member (2009-11) and 2013 president of AIChE; and was the founding Chair of AIChE's Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum. His teaching, research, and service have been recognized in recent years by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab's David Shirley Award, AIChE's Gary Leach Award and George Lappin Award, ASEE's William Corcoran Award, the National Science Foundation Directors Award for Collaborative Integration, the UMass College of Engineering Outstanding Senior Faculty Award, by being named a Fellow of AIChE, and by AIChE's 2017 Institute Award for Industrial Gas Technology.