John Prausnitz GS '55 has been named a recipient of the National Medal of Science, a prestigious award for achievement in science and technology.
Prausnitz, a chemical engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, will receive the medal along with nine other honorees, at a ceremony at the White House on March 14.
He has won several awards over the course of his career, including an honorary degree from Princeton in 1995, but "none [were] as good as this one," Prausnitz said in an interview Thursday.
The medal honors his work at UC Berkeley in applying molecular thermodynamics — a field most commonly associated with chemistry and physics — to engineering problems.
His research helped to improve the safety of chemical manufacturing processes by identifying volatile combinations of chemicals.
"You can calculate compositions of chemical mixtures which will be explosive or which will burn, and of course you want to stay away from those," Prausnitz said.
His discoveries also improved the efficiency of chemical manufacturing.
"The main part [of the research] is actually economic, if you want to make chemicals and want to do it in the cheapest way possible," he said.
Prausnitz cited the difficulty of isolating specific molecules in chemical compounds for commercial purposes.
"An example is petroleum, which has a lot of different molecules. There's some that we want, some that we don't want," he said. "So we try to get out the ones that we want in the most efficient way."
His current research is focused on applying molecular thermodynamics to biotechnology.
Prausnitz received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Princeton. He earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell.
"I enjoyed Princeton very much," he said. "It was a wonderful experience, as it is today. I got to know many interesting people and they're friends of mine to this day. I've kept in touch with many of them."
Prausnitz spent his last two years at Princeton as a junior faculty member teaching undergraduates before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley.
"I teach thermodynamics for undergraduates, and in past years I've taught thermodynamics for graduate students" he said. "Also, we have a large chemical engineering lab and I participate in that as well."
This summer will mark the 50th anniversary of his career at UC Berkeley.
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