Dr. Rakesh Agrawal
Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering
The School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University is pleased to announce that Dr. Rakesh Agrawal has joined the faculty as the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.
Rakesh comes to Purdue after several years of distinguished service at Air Products and Chemicals Inc., where he joined in 1980 and rose rapidly through the ranks to become Air Products Fellow. He was also the first chair of Air products' Technology Board. He was instrumental in developing and driving Air products' "New Waves" document that set out some major growth opportunities for Air Products based on the emerging social and technological trends and many of the opportunities were implemented. His group was involved in the development of new process flowsheets for a wide array of chemical production and separation plants, and was a prime user of process synthesis methods. The holder or co-holder of 116 U.S. patents and nearly 500 non-U.S. patents, he has made truly extraordinary contributions to the development of gas liquefaction and cryogenic separation technologies, holding more patents than any individual in Air Products' history. These patented ideas have been applied to nearly 100 operating plants with total capital expenditure for these plants in excess of $1billion. He also has 64 published papers in the areas of gas separations, membranes, distillation and other separation and liquefaction processes.
Rakesh is the recipient of several awards from Air Products and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He was the youngest recipient ever of Air Products' prestigious Chairman's Award, the most important award the company bestows for long lasting contributions to its business. He received the Presidential Citation for Outstanding Achievement Award from the University of Delaware in 1995, AIChE's 1998 award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology and its Separations Division's Clarence G. Gerhold Award in 2001, the Institute of Refrigeration's J & E Hall Gold Medal in 2004, was Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2002. Rakesh received his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, master's from the University of Delaware and his doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.