Editorial pubs.acs.org/IECR
Massimo Morbidelli Festschrift Preface
■
MASSIMO MORBIDELLIEDUCATOR, SCIENTIST, AND LEADER It is our great pleasure to present this Festschrift to honor Professor Massimo Morbidelli of ETH Zurich on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Massimo was born on March 12, 1954, in Vercelli, Italy. He received his Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering under the mentorship of Professor Sergio Carrà at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in 1986 under the guidance of Professor Arvind Varma. His academic carrier started as Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Milano in 1977. Later on, he has been appointed Professor at University of Cagliari (Italy), where he served an effective five-year term as Director of Studies in Chemical Engineering (1986−1991) and a three-year term as Department Chair (1986−1989). In the same period, he contributed to the recruitment of talented faculties and to the considerable growth in quality and stature of both the undergraduate and the graduate program. In January 1991, he moved back to his starting school as Professor of Applied Physical Chemistry. Since 1997, he has been Professor of Chemical Reaction Engineering at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich (Switzerland), where he has been appointed as Director of Studies in Chemical Engineering in 2000, Institute Chair during the periods 1997−1999, 2004−2006, 2008−2010, and Departmental Chair since 2012. © 2014 American Chemical Society
Massimo has been a distinguished scientist in chemical engineering for more than 35 years. Through the creative combination of experimental and theoretical research, he has given pioneering contributions in different areas, with particular emphasis on chemical reaction engineering, polymer reaction engineering, colloidal engineering, and separation processes based on continuous chromatography. In these research fields, he has authored or coauthored more than 500 peer reviewed articles on reputed international journals, a dozen of international patents and four books. Notably, Massimo has coauthored, with Professor Varma, a major textbook entitled Mathematical Methods in Chemical Engineering (Oxford University Press, 1997) which has been adopted over the years as senior-graduate-level textbook in more than 40 universities worldwide. In chemical reaction engineering, Massimo has been mainly addressing, in collaboration with his co-workers, two subjects, i.e., optimal distribution of catalyst in pellets and parametric sensitivity and runaway behavior. In the first case, his main results are summarized in the monograph Catalyst Design: Optimal Distribution of Catalyst in Pellets, Reactors and Membranes (Cambridge University Press, 2001): such deep understanding has had direct implications in the development Special Issue: Massimo Morbidelli Festschrift Received: May 2, 2014 Accepted: May 7, 2014 Published: June 4, 2014 8937
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ie501816a | Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2014, 53, 8937−8938
Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research
Editorial
the isolation and purification of proteins, peptides, and monoclonal antibodies. Massimo has contributed to many different scientific and professional organizations with enthusiasm and commitment. From 1987 to 1997, he served as Italian representative at the Working Party on Chemical Reaction Engineering of the European Federation of Chemical Engineering. In 1994, he was a member of the Board of Directors of the International Adsorption Society. In 2002, he became a member of the Directors of the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has been, or still is, a member of the editorial board of several reputed scientific journals (among them Separation Science and Technology, Cambridge Series in Chemical Engineering, Polymer Reaction Engineering, International Journal of Chemical Reactor Engineering, Macromolecules Materials and Engineering, Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, and Reviews in Chemical Engineering can be mentioned). Currently, he also serves as Associate Editor of the ACS journal Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research. In 2005, Massimo has been the recipient of the prestigious R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In addition, Massimo has been a special, unforgettable teacher for many generations of students, not only because of his ability to deliver difficult concepts with crystalline clarity, but also for showing an exemplary dedication and passion for his teaching activities in class. The fact that so many of his students and postdoctoral research associates have undergone successful careers in academia and in major companies clearly shows the impact of his excellent training and positive influence. In 2007, his well-organized and intellectually stimulating lectures led him to win the Golden Owl for the best teacher of the year from the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences at ETH Zurich. We gratefully thank Massimo’s many colleagues and friends from various institutions all around the world for contributing to this issue in his honor.
of rational strategies for design and manufacture of catalysts. In the second area, rigorous as well as readily applicable criteria to identify regions of parametric sensitivity for various types of chemical and catalytic reactors have been developed. This work, with the applications to air pollution, combustion and metabolic systems, has been summarized in the monograph Parametric Sensitivity in Chemical Systems (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Massimo has worked extensively also in polymer reaction engineering. Since his first works on the detailed modeling of emulsion polymerization, his contribution to the optimal design of this type of polymerization processes has been wellestablished. During the years, he has been active in covering many different types of polymerization mechanisms and processes. The effective modeling of multicomponent systems, the mechanistic analysis of different heterogeneous systems (and especially in supercritical media), the understanding of the interaction between process type and kinetic mechanism in controlled polymerizations, the kinetic analysis of degradable materials produced by ring-opening polymerization, and the synthesis of cross-linked polymers for applications such as cell scaffolds and drug delivery, have been among some of his distinguished contributions in this research area. The application of his ideas and methods to several industrial processes has been invariably contributing to the understanding of the underlying mechanisms taking place and to the quality optimization of the final polymers. More recently, Massimo has been working in the field of colloidal dispersions. Combining fundamental colloidal science with modeling tools typical of chemical engineering, he has contributed to the development of the so-called “colloidal engineering”. With emphasis to industrial applications, he has given a unique contribution toward the rational design of processes, which still involve too much empiricism and a trial-anderror approach. Among his major contributions, the development of aggregation kernels suitable to be applied under different regimes (diffusion-limited, reaction-limited, with and without flow contribution) and the detailed interaction between the morphology of the aggregates of colloidal particles and the process conditions need to be mentioned. An outstanding result in this very specific field has been the development of a novel method aimed to the production of porous materials by controlled assembly of colloidal particles, both polymeric and inorganic ones. This process, referred to in the literature as reactive gelation, has been recently patented and represents a platform for the design of novel, porous materials, whose applications range from catalyst supports, adsorbents, and thermal and sound insulators. Massimo is also recognized as a leader in the field of adsorption-based separation processes, with particular emphasis on the so-called simulated moving bed (SMB) technology which allows the continuous chromatographic separation of fine chemicals at scales ranging from laboratory to commodity industry. In particular, he has demonstrated that the selection of the operating conditions to obtain high separation performances under nonlinear conditions can be achieved through the development of a general theory which provides explicit criteria for process design. More recently, different multicolumn configurations have been explored as well as applied to the separation of enantiomers and biomolecules typical of the pharmaceutical industry. In particular, he has developed the socalled Multicolumn Solvent Gradient Purification (MCSGP) as a way to achieve at the same time high purity levels and significant yield values. Such process has been successfully applied to
Giacomo Cao*
Department of Mechanical, Chemical and Materials Engineering, University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy
Giuseppe Storti
Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Maurizio Masi
■
Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering “Giulio Natta”, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
AUTHOR INFORMATION
Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected]. Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS. The authors declare no competing financial interest.
8938
dx.doi.org/10.1021/ie501816a | Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 2014, 53, 8937−8938
