Congratulations to affiliate faculty member Linda Broadbelt, elected to National Academy of Engineering

EVANSTON, Ill. ---  Northwestern Engineering’s Linda Broadbelt has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional distinctions awarded to an engineer.

Broadbelt, Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor and professor of chemical and biological engineering is among the 86 new members and 18 new foreign members announced by the NAE today, February 7. She will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE’s annual meeting on October 6, in Washington, D.C.

Broadbelt was cited for “contributions to complex kinetic modeling, particularly for understanding the pathways by which hydrocarbons and polymers undergo pyrolysis.” Chen was cited for “contributions to design under uncertainty in products and systems, and leadership in the engineering design community.”

Broadbelt is internationally recognized for contributions in complex kinetics modeling of hydrocarbon chemistry, particularly for the development of automated mechanism generation techniques and methods for specification of rate coefficients. She is applying her computational expertise to diverse fields, including catalysis, degradation kinetics, and biological pathway identification. Much of her work has been adopted by industry.

Broadbelt, who joined Northwestern’s Chemical and Biological Engineering’s faculty in 1994, also serves as associate dean. Along with being Fulbright Distinguished Scholar and visiting researcher at the Imperial College London, Broadbelt has earned many honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, and an E.V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. She is a Fellow of AIChE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received the R.H. Wilhelm Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 2018.

Founded in 1964, the National Academy of Engineering is a private, independent, nonprofit institution that provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. It has more than 2,000 peer-elected members and foreign associates, senior professionals in business, academia and government, who are among the world’s most accomplished engineers.

Adapted from the February 7, 2019 news article from Northwestern Engineering News