Claire Adjiman and Nilay Shah elected Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineers

Professor Claire Adjiman and Professor Nilay Shah recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering for their outstanding research contributions.

Every year members of the Royal Academy of Engineering nominate their peers for this prestigious Fellowship in recognition of their contributions towards the engineering disciplines. Fellowship of the Academy is considered to be one of the highest national honours that an engineer may receive and is awarded to the UK's most eminent engineers representing the nation’s best engineering researchers, innovators, entrepreneurs, business and industry leaders. This year only 50 new Fellows were elected, of whom four were from Imperial College. We are delighted to have Professors Claire Adjiman and Nilay Shah represent the Department of Chemical Engineering in this elite group.

A full list of the Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering can be found here.

Claire Adjiman

Professor Claire Adjiman FREng

Professor Claire Adjiman has spent her research career in the field of Molecular Systems Engineering. Her focus has been to improve the design of chemical processes by creating tools that can model the behaviour of materials at a molecular level under various process conditions. It is usually unfeasible to evaluate every possible material that is involved in a chemical process. However, Professor Adjiman’s research aims at giving engineers and scientists the tools to model the behaviour of a wide range of material choices – for example we could evaluate the effect of thousands of solvents, a variety of mixtures, a broad range of process temperatures and pressures and a multitude of reactor vessel materials. The ability to broaden our choices at every level of process design promises improvements in every area of chemical engineering.

Read more about Professor Claire Adjiman's research.

Nilay Shah

Professor Nilay Shah FREng

As Director of the Centre for Process Systems Engineering, Professor Nilay Shah has pushed the boundaries of how we look at industrial and energy systems. By treating every step in a large process as a variable that contributes to the overall efficiency of the system, Professor Shah’s research aims to optimise the way we design and operate processes. Some of his most important work has been in the field of designing and analysing energy production systems – for example in minimising the cost of bio-ethanol production or in the modelling and optimisation of technologies like carbon capture and storage systems. Over his career, Professor Shah has been a co-author on over 100 papers and has been awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s MacRobert Award for his innovative contributions to UK engineering.

Read more about Professor Nilay Shah's work.

On behalf of the Department and the College please join us in congratulating Professor Claire Adjiman and Professor Nilay Shah on this outstanding achievement.

Follow the links to find out more about the research in Molecular Systems Engineering and cutting edge work in the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at the Department.