Christopher W. Jones, the Love Family Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech, has been selected by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) as the 2016 winner of the Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering.

Each year, the award recognizes outstanding progress in the field of chemical engineering by one researcher in any area of chemical engineering research who is less than 45 years of age at the end of the calendar year in which the award is presented. 

One of the AIChE’s most prestigious awards, the awardee must have made a significant contribution to the science of chemical engineering, such as development of a new process or product in the chemical engineering field or distinguished service rendered to the profession of chemical engineering.

Jones is being honored for the development of novel materials for carbon dioxide adsorption and elucidation of reaction pathways using supported molecular catalysts. Jones has also served the chemistry and chemical engineering community through his leadership as the founding editor-in-chief of the journal ACS Catalysis, the pre-eminent comprehensive catalysis journal, which was launched by the American Chemical Society in 2010. 

In addition to his contributions to research in chemistry and chemical engineering, Jones has served as the associate vice president for research at Georgia Tech since 2013, where he leads an array of interdisciplinary research activities that span the breadth of the Institute.

Jones joined Georgia Tech in 2000 as an assistant professor, and in the last 16 years his research team has produced over 200 papers that have been cited more than 10,000 times.

He has supervised or co-supervised 10 MS and 26 PhD theses to date, while advising 29 post-doctoral fellows. Alumni from his group work in a diverse array of organizations around the globe ranging from the U.S. Department of Energy to the Shell Oil Company and IBM. Twenty of his former mentees now hold faculty positions across the globe, including positions in the U.S., Chile, China, India, Japan, Jordan, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, and Vietnam.   

Jones will receive the award at the AIChE Annual Meeting in San Francisco, California, on November 13, 2016.