Dr. Klavs F. Jensen, the Warren K. Lewis Professor in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will speak on Monday, April 15 and Tuesday, April 16 in the 2019 Kelly Lecture Series, presented by the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering.

Dr. Jensen’s Monday lecture, titled “Automated Systems and Machine Learning for Chemical Synthesis,” will take place at 3:00 pm in Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering, Room 3059.

Tuesday’s lecture, “Accelerating Development and Intensifying Chemical Processes,” will be held in Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering Room G140.

Both lectures are free and open to the public.

Dr. Jensen was the head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT from 2007 through July 2015. He received his MSc in Chemical Engineering from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include on-demand multistep synthesis, methods for automated synthesis, and machine learning techniques for chemical synthesis and interpreting large chemical data sets. He is a co-director of MIT's Pharma AI consortium that aims to bring machine learning technology into pharmaceutical discovery and development. Catalysis, chemical kinetics and transport phenomena are also topics of interest along with development of methods for predicting performance of reactive chemical systems. He is the co-author of more than 430 refereed journal and 175 conference publications as well as 8 edited volumes and 50 US patents. He chairs the Editorial Board for the new Royal Society of Chemistry Journal Reaction Chemistry and Engineering. He serves on advisory boards to universities, companies, professional societies, and governments. He is the recipient of several awards, including a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Allan P. Colburn, Charles C.M. Stine, R.H. Wilhelm, W.H. Walker, and Founders Awards of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He received the inaugural IUPAC-ThalesNano Prize in Flow Chemistry in 2012 and the inaugural Corning International Prize for Outstanding Work in Continuous Flow Reactors & Chemistry in 2018. Professor Jensen is a member of the US National Academies of Sciences and Engineering as well as the American Academy of Arts and Science. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The Davidson School of Chemical Engineering Arthur Kelly Lecture Series was established by a grant from alumnus Arthur Kelly (BSChE ‘24). Kelly was a retired Executive Vice-President and Director of B.F. Goodrich Co. He received an honorary doctorate from Purdue in 1961. The Kelly Lectures are presented annually by outstanding engineers and scientists from the broad areas of chemical engineering. The recipients are selected by the faculty in recognition of their contributions to research and education. Past Kelly Lecturers include legendary figures in chemical engineering and two Nobel laureates.