Julio Ottino Receives AIChE’s Founders Award

Northwestern Engineering Dean Julio M. Ottino has received the 2018 Founders Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Chemical Engineering from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

The award recognizes one individual each year for their impact in the chemical engineering field and whose achievements have advanced the profession.

Ottino, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Distinguished Robert R. McCormick Institute Professor at the McCormick School of Engineering, will formally accept the award at AIChE’s Honors Ceremony on October 28 during the AIChE 2018 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Linda Broadbelt,  Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, will receive the R.H. Wilhelm Award at the ceremony.

Founded in 1908, AIChE is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals with more than 60,000 members from more than 100 countries. The Founders Award is the fifth AIChE honor for Ottino, who previously received the Alpha Chi Sigma Award, the William H. Walker Award, delivered the Institute Lecture, and was named one of the "100 Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era."

Ottino’s research interests include investigating a broad class of problems where there exists competition between order and disorder, such as in mixing and segregating granular matter, as well as problems in the realm of complex systems involving tools, such as agent-based models and network theory. His experimental and theoretical work has unveiled connections between chaos theory and the mixing of fluids, impacting fields as diverse as complex systems, fluid dynamics, granular dynamics, microfluidics, and geophysical sciences.

Ottino is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, he received the NAE’s prestigious 2017 Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education for the development of Whole-Brain Engineering, the principle guiding strategy for Northwestern Engineering.