Professor Carol Hall Selected to Receive the AIChE Margaret H. Rousseau Pioneer Award

Professor Carol K. Hall was selected to receive the Margaret H. Rousseau Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement by a Woman Chemical Engineer for 2020. This AIChE Institute award is presented to a woman member of AIChE who “has made significant contributions to chemical engineering research or practice over the course of her career,” and is in recognition of the awardee’s contributions in raising the visibility of women engineers and paving the way for women to have a greater impact in chemical engineering.

The award honors the memory of Dr. Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau, the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from MIT, the first woman member of AIChE, the first female AIChE Fellow, and the first woman to receive AIChE’s Founders Award. Dr. Rousseau contributed to Pfizer’s effort to scale-up and design the first deep-tank penicillin fermentation commercial plant; the novel technology enabling mass production of the first “miracle drug” that saved many lives during World War II.

Prof. Hall, the Camille Dreyfus Distinguished University Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, was one of the first women to be appointed to a chemical engineering faculty in the United States. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and serves as its Home Secretary.

Prof. Hall is a Fellow of the AIChE, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest scientific society. Only small percentages of engineers and scientists are elected as Fellows of a technical society.

She is the recipient of the AIChE Founders Award, for outstanding contributions to the field and the Foundations of Molecular Modeling and Simulation (FOMMS) Medal, to honor “profound and lasting contribution by one or more individuals to the development of computational methods and their application to the field of molecular-based modeling and simulation.” In 2008, she was listed in “One Hundred Engineers of the Modern Era” for significant contributions to the profession and society, as part of the AIChE Centennial Celebration.

A copy of Prof. Hall’s autobiography is available here.

Congratulations to Professor Hall for this well-deserved honor!