October 8, 2024
The Chevron Chair of Chemical Engineering was established in 1981 through a grant of the Standard Oil Company of California to be awarded to a faculty member working in an energy-related area. The Chair was given in honor of Mr. George M. Keller 1948 CH, the retiring Chevron CEO at the time, a longstanding member of the Chemical Engineering Visiting Committee, and a member of the MIT Corporation. Mr. Keller died in 2008.
Fikile Brushett obtained his B.S.E. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, where he was also a member of the men’s varsity soccer team. He completed his M.S. (2009) and Ph.D. (2010) in Chemical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Paul J.A. Kenis. From 2010 to 2012, he was a Director’s Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory with John T. Vaughey and Andrew N. Jansen. Fik is an internationally recognized leader in the field of energy storage who has utilized classical chemical engineering principles to approach the broader problem of electrochemical device design. His deep knowledge of electrochemistry, transport and design have enabled creative results in the examination of new battery systems and the optimization of electrochemical energy device components. Fik ushered in a new era of nonaqueous flow batteries that has led to several advances based on materials development and analysis; furthermore, he is well-known for his design-based methods based on extensive technoeconomic analysis. His group is tackling important challenges in energy storage, resource recovery, and environmental stewardship with emerging interest in the role of electrochemical processing in sustainable, distributed chemical manufacturing.
Fikile’s recognitions include the AIChE Allan P. Colburn Award (2022), the ECS Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award (2022), the NOBCChE Lloyd N. Ferguson Young Investigator Award (2020), the ECS ETD Supramaniam Srinivasan Young Investigator Award (2019), and the C&EN Talented 12 (2017). Within the Department, he has co-taught Chemical Engineering Fluid Mechanics 10.301 as well as a Chemical Engineering Design ICE-T module 10.492A, and was recognized with the C. Michael Mohr Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching (2014, 2017). He has also provided service to the Department and across the Institute, including the Graduate Admissions Committee, the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) Committee, the Committee on the Undergraduate Program (CUP), and a Task Force 2021 subcommittee (RIC.7). He was a recent recipient of the Department’s DEI Award last year.