Chemical engineering professor Lawrence Pratt honored by American Chemical Society

Lawrence Pratt, a chemical engineering professor in the School of Science and Engineering at Tulane University, has won a prestigious American Chemical Society award.

Pratt was named winner of the 2018 Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids sponsored by Exxon-Mobil.

He, along with several other award recipients, will be honored at the ACS national meeting awards ceremony on March 20, 2018, in New Orleans.

“This award honors Joel Henry Hildebrand, who contributed over many decades to the founding of physical chemistry of liquids and liquid solutions at [the University of California at] Berkeley,” Pratt said.

He added that the award reflects his own progress in developing chemically specific, statistical mechanical theory of aqueous solutions relevant to molecular biophysics but also in a broader context of energy technology.

At Tulane, Pratt is the Herman and George R. Brown Chair in Chemical Engineering. The Brown Chair was created by The Brown Foundation to support and advance Tulane’s teaching and research in chemical engineering.

His research interests include thermodynamics and statistical thermodynamics; molecular theory of liquids, water and aqueous solutions; molecular simulation; and design of electrical energy storage materials.

Pratt has been at Tulane since 2008. Prior to arriving at Tulane in 2008, he held appointments in chemistry at UC–Berkeley, where he and Hildebrand were colleagues, and as a technical staff member at Los Alamos National Laboratory.