Congratulations to Paul Kenis for being selected for the Electrochemical Society’s 2020 Energy Technology Division Research Award.
The award recognizes outstanding and original contributions to the science and technology of energy related research areas that include scientific and technological aspects of fossil fuels and alternative energy sources, energy management and environmental consequences of energy utilization.
Kenis, Elio E. Tarika Chair in Chemical Engineering and Department Head, will be formally recognized with the award at the ECS meeting in Spring 2020 in Montreal. At that meeting he will also deliver a presentation about his work.
His research revolves around microchemical systems. Applications range from platforms for energy conversion such as fuel cells, for radiolabeling of biomolecules, and for protein/pharmaceutical crystallization to platforms for cell biology studies. Over the last decade, he has focused on the electrocatalytic reduction of CO2 to valuable chemical intermediates and fuels—developing suitable catalysts, electrodes, and electrolyzers, determining suitable operation conditions, and performing techno-economic analysis as a guide toward more energy-efficient systems.
Kenis is a coauthor of reports on the prospects of CO2 utilization at scale issued by the National Academies as well as the global Mission Innovation consortium. He also is an investigator at the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research, a collaboration between Kyushu University in Japan and the University of Illinois.