Colloid Division Honors Two

The ACS Division of Colloid & Surface Chemistry has selected two scientists as winners of its 2004 Langmuir Lecture Awards. Israel E. Wachs will speak on solid-vacuum or solid-gas interfaces, and Darsh T. Wasan will lecture about liquid interfaces, including disperse systems. The awards will be presented on Tuesday, Aug. 24, at the ACS national meeting in Philadelphia.

Wachs, the G. Whitney Snyder Professor and a professor of chemical engineering at Lehigh University, studies catalytic surface chemistry. His initial research focused on metal surface science, but later he branched out to study the surface chemistry of complex metal oxides. Wachs has pioneered the surface science of supported metal oxide catalysts, where an active 2-D surface metal oxide is dispersed on an oxide support substrate.

Wachs received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the City College of the City University of New York in 1973 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 1977. After graduation, he joined Exxon's Corporate Research Laboratory in 1977. He joined Lehigh University's department of chemical engineering in 1987.

Wasan, the Motorola Chair Professor of Chemical Engineering and vice president for international affairs at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), works on dispersion science and engineering, including foams, emulsions and particle dispersions, wetting and spreading of nanofluids on solid surfaces, detergency, and interfacial and film rheology.

He received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 1960, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. He has been at IIT since then, serving at various times as chairman of the chemical engineering department, dean of engineering, vice president for research and technology, and provost and vice president for academic affairs. In addition to numerous other awards, Wasan has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Colloid & Interface Science since 1993 and also serves on the editorial advisory boards of other periodicals.