Two engineering professors received the University Co-op's highest research awards.
Nicholas Peppas, professor of biomedical engineering and chemical engineering and pharmaceutics, received this year’s University Co-op Career Research Excellence Award in honor of maintaining a superior research program across many years. Peppas, who holds the Fletcher Stuckey Pratt Chair in Engineering, was noted as being widely recognized as the father of modern drug delivery and its leading researcher, inventor and pacesetter. His research contributions span many areas including drug delivery, biomaterials, biomolecular engineering, mass transfer, polymerization kinetics and reaction engineering, and polymers physics.
Benny Freeman won this year’s University Co-op Best Research Paper Award with a paper published in Science on a rubbery material that can purify hydrogen efficiently for fuel cells and oil refining. Freeman, the Kenneth A. Kobe Professor in Chemical Engineering, received the award for the paper “Plasticization-Enhanced H2 Purification Using Polymeric Membranes.” Also contributing to the paper were graduate student Haiqing Lin, now at Membrane Technology and Research, Elizabeth van Wagner, and Research Triangle Institute collaborators Lora Toy and Raghubir Gupta.
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