Professor Art Ragauskas accepted the Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal award—the highest honor that the Association can bestow upon an individual—at TAPPI’s Awards Dinner April 29 at PaperCon in Nashville.  The award is given to an individual or individuals who have made preeminent scientific and engineering achievements of proven applied benefit to the world’s pulp, paper, board, and forest products industries and the other industries that TAPPI serves.

Ragauskas held the first Fulbright Chair in Alternative Energy and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, International Academy of Wood Science and TAPPI. He is the recipient of the 2014 ACS Affordable Green Chemistry award. His multifaceted research program at Georgia Tech explored innovative sustainable bioresources to develop new and improved applications for renewable biopolymers for biofuels, biopower, and bio-based materials and chemicals.

As of June 1, Art headed to a new appointment at the University of Tennessee/Oak Ridge National Lab Governor’s Chair for Biorefining.  He has held appointments at IPST and Georgia Tech for 25 years, and will continue to build on that research relationship in his new assignment.  Art retains an adjunct professor appointment with the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry & Biochemistry where he will continue to direct the research of several Paper Science and Engineering PhD candidates.  We wish Art success in his new appointment, his continuing relationship with RBI-GA Tech, and his research in the forest bioproducts field.