Professor Alan Weimer in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award for Particle Technology from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.
The award recognizes Weimer’s lifetime of scientific achievement, including fundamental understanding, discovery, engineering scale-up and commercialization of processes to synthesize ultrafine ceramic powders and to apply nanoscale films to ultrafine particle surfaces.
Weimer, the H.T. Sears Memorial Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1996 after 16 years with the Dow Chemical Company and has spent his entire career processing powders.
At Dow, he invented the commercial rapid carbothermal reduction process for producing ultrafine non-oxide ceramic powders, including tungsten carbide. The process was later sold to Sandvik Coromant and commercialized in Coromant UK, resulting in the manufacture of high-quality cutting tools, including circuit board microdrills, that are among the best in the world.
Weimer received Dow’s Ceramics Founder’s Award (1990), Inventor of the Year Award (1993) and Excellence in Science Award (1995).
At CU, he co-invented particle atomic layer deposition processes for coating primary particles with films, leading to the co-founding of ALD NanoSolutions in 2001. He has been named Inventor of the Year at CU (2004) and received Faculty Research Awards from both the Boulder Faculty Assembly and College of Engineering and Applied Science in 2005. He has received five additional major research awards from AIChE and the U.S. Department of Energy.
Weimer is named inventor on 38 issued U.S patents and has published nearly 200 papers in peer-reviewed research journals. He has graduated 24 doctoral students, currently advises or co-advises 10 more, and mentored more than 100 undergraduates in his lab. He is an adjunct professor at the Australian National University (Canberra).
He will accept the Lifetime Achievement Award, sponsored by Elsevier, at the 2017 AIChE Annual Meeting in November in Minneapolis.