Chemical and Biological Engineering

This distinguished lectureship honors the memory of Richard H. Wilhelm, a graduate of Columbia University who spent his entire professional career at Princeton University. He joined the Department of Chemical Engineering in 1934 and served as chairman from 1954 until his death in 1968. In recognition of his distinguished teaching, he was named Henry Putnam University Professor by Princeton University and given the Warren K. Lewis Award in Chemical Engineering Education by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

For his research leadership in numerous areas of chemical reaction engineering, he received from the AIChE the William H. Walker Award in 1951 and the Professional Progress Award in 1952 and the Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 1966. In 1968 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional distinction that can be conferred upon an American engineer.

In 1973, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers established the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering, presented each year to an individual in recognition of significant and new contributions in the field. The Richard H. Wilhelm Lectureship was established through the generosity of his colleagues, friends, and students.

Martin Feinberg is the Richard Morrow Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Professor of Mathematics at The Ohio State University. Prior to that he was a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester. He received his B.Ch.E. degree at Cooper Union, his M.S. degree at Purdue University, and his Ph.D. degree at Princeton University, where he was a student of William Schowalter.

Shortly after his doctoral thesis in fluid mechanics and after his arrival in Rochester, Professor Feinberg initiated work aimed at understanding the behavior of complex chemical reaction networks. He was soon joined in Rochester by Fritz Horn, just after Horn had begun seminal work on reaction networks with his Rice University colleague Roy Jackson. Research by Horn, Jackson and Feinberg laid the early foundations for what has become known as chemical reaction network theory. In the many years since, Professor Feinberg, his students, and his collaborators have extended the theory greatly in many directions, some of considerable interest to cell biologists. The Chemical Reaction Network Toolbox, a computer program that implements part of the theory, has had over 10,000 downloads.

In the 1980s, Professor Feinberg did quite different work on the foundations of classical thermodynamics, much of it in collaboration with Richard Lavine. In the 1990s he also became interested in the attainable region approach to optimal reactor design, an idea initiated much earlier by his old colleague, Fritz Horn.

Professor Feinberg has won several awards for both teaching and research. In particular, he was given the University of Rochester’s Edward Peck Curtis Award for Teaching Excellence, presented to just one professor each year at commencement. For his work on chemical reaction network theory Professor Feinberg received the AIChE’s prestigious R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering.