"The boundary between 'midieval' and 'modern' is always advancing; and our age of coal and oil and sooty slums may some day be accounted medieval by an era of cleaner power and more gracious life."

Will Durant (The Age of Faith, 1950).

Growing energy costs, dwindling fossil-fuel resources and impending environmental crisis have driven efforts to re-invent our energy infrastructure as a clean and renewable energy network. And just as Chemical Reaction Engineering was at the center of the development of the 20th-century oil-based energy infrastructure, Chemical Reaction Engineering remains critical to the development of renewable energy and fuels technology. To that end, my research efforts are focused upon reforming of renewable (biological or agricultural) hydrocarbon resources (e.g., ethanol, sugars, butanol, vegetable oils) for efficient energy production and displacement of petroleum for commodity chemicals.

Our research group combines fundamentals of reaction engineering with advanced materials, process intensification and membrane technology to investigate, and ultimately control, interactions between multiple physical and chemical processes within integrated or multifunctional reactors. Our efforts focus upon developing alternative energy systems (e.g. fuel cells, fuel reforming) and green fuels production (e.g. biodiesel production), and identifying means of producing commodity chemicals from non-petroleum resources.