Professor Fan receives pinnacle chemical engineering education award

John Easton Professor of Engineering and Distinguished University Professor L.-S. Fan’s research and inventions are world-renowned. Inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2001, his clean energy chemical looping technology has been licensed to industry for commercial deployment. In 1996, he earned one of the highest awards for research excellence offered by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research.

Now his teaching is earning national accolades. He has earned AIChE's top prize for teaching, the Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education, named for one of the founders of modern chemical engineering. The prize is sponsored by Exxon Mobil Research and Engineering Company and recognizes distinguished and continuing contributions to chemical engineering education.

Fan is being honored for his multifaceted chemical engineering education contributions, which include outstanding teaching, superior textbooks, student and faculty mentoring, and outreach leadership to diverse groups, the general public, and K-12 students.

He and the other award recipients will be honored at the 2022 AIChE Annual Meeting, November 13-18 in Phoenix, Arizona.

He is an author of 465 journal papers, 70 patents, and six books, including the widely adopted textbook Principles of Gas-Solid Flows and recently published Dynamics of Multiphase Flows. Another of his books, The Expanding World of Chemical Engineering, has gained popularity with general audiences as an introduction to chemical engineering. He has also delivered 36 named lectureships globally.

Fan’s impact on education has been extensive. In addition to service on the National Academies’ Diversity Work Force committee on K-12 STEM, he has been a faculty and student mentor at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), served on an NSF/AIChE book writing team for a high school “Active Chemistry” textbook, and has judged the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. He has also served on the advisory board of the American Society of Engineering Education’s Journal of Engineering Education.

Fan’s other activities include participation on AIChE’s Societal Impact Operating Council and on AIChE Journal advisory board. His teaching at Ohio State has been lauded with numerous awards – including the College of Engineering’s Faculty Mentoring Award – and he has advised more than 200 graduate students and post-doctoral associates. His undergraduate and graduate students have won many awards from such entities as the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society and the American Institute of Chemists.

Fan’s research centers on multiphase reaction engineering and particle science and technology (PST). As a proponent of particle science, he was the founding chair of AIChE’s Particle Technology Forum and he is editor-in-chief of the journal Powder Technology.

In expressing his gratitude for the Lewis Award honor, Fan noted that, in addition to the recognition that the award brings to chemical engineering education, he appreciates the attention his selection brings to PST.

“The PST field has not generally been accorded commensurate emphasis in traditional chemical engineering education,” said Fan, “despite the fact that over 50% of the intermediate and final products from the petrochemical, pharmaceutical, mining, and food processing industries are in granular form. Knowledge of PST’s basic concepts can be integrated into traditional chemical engineering courses such as transport phenomena and reaction engineering.”

While available textbooks now teach some specific aspects of PST, Fan believes more efforts in textbook writing in this field are needed. “AIChE’s Particle Technology Forum has promoted PST education, and I hope that my Lewis Award recognition will further invigorate the continued efforts of the PST field to secure its position in the mainstream of the chemical engineering curriculum,” he added.

Fan has been a chemical engineering faculty member at Ohio State since 1978 and served as department chair from 1994 to 2003. He received his B.S. (1970) from National Taiwan University, and his M.S. (1973) and Ph.D. (1975) from West Virginia University, all in chemical engineering. In addition, he earned an M.S. (1978) in statistics from Kansas State University.