Professor Mark B. Shiflett will be talking about “The History of Refrigerants: What’s Next?” in the next CCEW-5 organized by the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering at SBASSE, LUMS. The session will take place via Zoom on October 12, 2021, at 4:00 pm PKT (GMT+5).

Professor Mark B. Shiflett is currently working at the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Kansas, USA.

Please REGISTER for the session via this link: https://forms.gle/E4rSHECvphAq8Mc67

About the speaker:

Mark B. Shiflett is a Distinguished Foundation Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Kansas (KU). Professor Shiflett joined KU as a Foundation Professor in August 2016 after retiring from the DuPont Company. Professor Shiflett worked for DuPont for 28 years and was a Technical Fellow in the Central Research and Development organization which is located at the Experimental Station in Wilmington, Delaware. Professor Shiflett was also an adjunct professor at the University of Delaware in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Professor Shiflett received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware in 2001 and 1998. He received his B.S. degree in chemical engineering from N.C. State University in 1989. Professor Shiflett is an inventor on 45 U.S. patents and has published 115 articles on his research in both academia and DuPont. He was awarded the DuPont Bolton Carothers award in 2005, the ACS Hero of Chemistry award in 2006 and the University of Delaware presidential citation in 2007 for his development of hydrofluorocarbon refrigerant mixtures to replace chlorofluorocarbons which were linked to the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer. Professor Shiflett was elected in 2014 to be a Fellow in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, in 2016 to be a Division Fellow in the American Chemical Society, and in 2018 to be a Fellow in the National Academy of Inventors for his significant professional accomplishments and contributions to the chemical engineering profession. Professor Shiflett received the American Institute of Chemical Engineers Institute award for Industrial Research in 2016 for the development of non-ozone-depleting refrigerants which have led to the healing of the Earth’s ozone layer, new applications using ionic liquids, an environmentally friendly TiO2 process and mentoring and educating chemical engineers. Professor Shiflett is a licensed professional engineer in the State of Delaware and his research at KU focuses on developing environmentally friendly, energy efficient processes and products for the chemical industry. Professor Shiflett is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Ionic Liquids published by Elsevier. To learn more about Professor Shiflett and his research group you can visit their website: www.shiflettresearch.com.

Professor George W Huber will be chatting with us in the 4th seminar session organized by the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering. This session will take place on 30th September 2021 at 5pm PKST and will be webcasted via Zoom.

Professor Huber is currently working in the Chemical and Biological Engineering area at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

Register at https://forms.gle/XwLS62c4rC5y1zco8 to attend live zoom session. 

About the Speaker:

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering is holding its third seminar session on 8 September 2021, at 9am PKST (GMT +5) via Zoom. In this session, Professor John Hartwig, from the University of California, Berkeley will be talking about 'Changing Chemical Synthesis with Catalysis". 

About the speaker: 

John F. Hartwig is one of the leading scientists in the field of catalysis. He received PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1990 and started his academic career as an Assistant Professor at Yale University in 1992 and was promoted to professor in 2008. Prof. Harwig was a junior professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign before moving to the UC Berkeley where he is Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry, and Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 2011.

Prof. Hartwig’s research group focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions of organic compounds catalyzed by transition metal complexes and artificial metalloenzymes. These findings result from a combination of organic synthesis, organometallic synthesis, protein design and evolution, and mechanistic analysis of catalytic systems.

Prof. Hartwig has numerous awards and names lectureships to his credit. For instance, he was awarded ACS Catalysis Lectureship (2013), ACS Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry (2004), national Institute of health MERIT Award (2014).

Registration: Please register at https://forms.gle/mD2zUc8oBueEc8ow5 to attend the live Zoom session.

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering is holding an insightful seminar on the topic of "Biologically Relevant Metrics of Particles in Indoor and Outdoor Environments" by Dr. Shahana Khurshid on 27 August 2021, at 3:30pm PST. 

About the Speaker: Dr. Shahana Khurshid studies air pollutants and their ability to cause adverse health effects. She has led over 25 research projects in universities, companies, and federal labs on air quality, exposure to pollutants, environmental conservation, cell lines, polymers, and biomedical assays. She grew up in Karachi, Pakistan before moving to the U.S. to pursue higher education where she received her B.S. in Environmental Engineering from MIT graduating in the top 5% of her class, M.S. in Biomedical Engineering and Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from UT Austin. After her Ph.D. she has worked at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and at UT Austin.

Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS is pleased to announce the next talk of the "Best of Water Systems Research" seminar series. The talk will be delivered by Dr. Ariel Dinar of UC Riverside and is titled "Dealing with Water Scarcity and Salinity: Adoption of Water Efficient Technologies and Management Practices by California Avocado Growers". 

About the speaker: Dr. Ariel Dinar is a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Economics and Policy at the School of Public Policy, University of California, Riverside (UCR). His work addresses various aspects of economic and strategic behavior associated with management of water, land and the environment. Dr. Dinar received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Since then he spent 15 years in the World Bank working on water and climate change economics and policy. In 2008, Dr. Dinar assumed a professorship at UCR. Dr. Dinar founded the Water Science and Policy Center, which he directed until 2014. Dr. Dinar is an International Fellow of the Center for Agricultural Economic Research of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel since November 2010; a Fulbright Senior Specialist since 2003; and was named a 2015 Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. He authored and co-authored nearly 250 publications in peer reviewed journals, policy outlets and book chapters. He co-authored and edited 29 books and textbooks. He founded two technical journals (Strategic Behavior and the Environment, and Water Economics and Policy) for the latter one he serves at present as an Editor-in-Chief. He founded and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the book series Global Issues in Water Policy.    
 
About the seminar series: The “Best of Water Systems Research” is a webinar series initiated by The Center for Water Informatics & Technology at LUMS. While our companion webcast series “Aab Beeti” is geared towards generating public awareness and meeting leading practitioners and opinion makers in Pakistan’s water sector, this new series (BWSR) is primarily meant for discussing serious scholarship on water resources. The series celebrates distinguished works in water systems research and is aimed towards researchers, practitioners, and technical experts in water-related areas. The list of speakers majorly consists of individuals who regularly deploy quantitative data-driven methods & systems thinking and have earned recognition via peer-reviewed research in top journals. Also, many of the speakers may or may not have a direct interest in the Indus or South Asia’s other basins.

The talks are (mostly) delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at https://wit.lums.edu.pk/BWSR2021 which also includes recordings of past sessions and information on future speakers.

A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again.
 

The cost-effective and waste-free synthesis of materials, life science goods, and all kinds of organic products require efficient chemical transformations. In this regard, the development of more active and selective catalysts constitutes a key factor for achieving improved processes and providing a sustainable chemical industry and society. Despite continuous advancements in all areas of catalysis, organic syntheses and the industrial production of most chemicals can be improved significantly in terms of sustainability and efficiency. The talk will show how new and improved homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysts can be developed by learning from each other. Specifically, the phenomenon of cooperative catalysis will be addressed in the context of non-noble metal-based catalysts. In detail, it will be demonstrated that recently developed molecular-defined and nanostructured cobalt and iron catalysts enable catalytic (de)hydrogenation processes with high yields and unprecedented selectivity. Examples that demonstrate the potential of such catalytic processes with bio-relevant metal complexes compared to more traditional catalytic reactions will also include reactions for energy technologies.   

About the speaker:   

Prof. Matthias Beller is one of the world’s leading professionals in the field of catalysis. He is the Scientific Director and Head of the Department of Applied Homogeneous Catalysis at Leibniz Institute of Catalysis, University of Rostock, Germany.  He completed his PhD with a distinction from the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the University of Gottingen. After that, he spent some time with Prof. Sharpless at the Massachusetts of Technology. Prof. Beller spent some time in the industry, after which he joined the Technical University of Munich as an associate professor in 1996. Since 1998, he is a professor of catalysis at Leibniz Institute of Catalysis.  

The research work of Prof. Beller centers on one of the key technologies of the new millennium: catalysis. Catalysts accelerate chemical reactions and reduce the amount of energy required for production. They are indispensable helpers and bring together, which in part would never connect without them.  His group’s work has been published in more than 800 original publications and reviews, and more than 90 patent applications have been filed in the past decade.  

Prof. Beller has received several awards, including the Otto-Roelen Medal and the Leibniz-Price of the DFG. In 2006, he was also awarded “Entrepreneur of the Year” of Rostock, and he received the German Federal Cross of Merit. Since then, he has received the first “European Prize for Sustainable Chemistry,” the “Paul N. Rylander Award” of the Organic Reaction Catalysis Society (Richland, WA) the Gay-Lussac-Alexander-von-Humboldt-Prize of the French Academy of Sciences, and the Emil Fischer Medal of the German Chemical Society. In 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and received the Wöhler price for Sustainable Chemistry from the German Chemical Society and an ERC grant from the European Commission. In March 2016, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Rennes 1. Prof. Beller is also Vice President of the Leibniz Society, one of the major science organizations in Germany, and a member of the German National Academy of Science “Leopoldina” and three other science academies.  

The Centre for Water Informatics & Technology at SBASSE, LUMS is extremely excited to announce the launch of a webinar series intended to celebrate distinguished works in ‘Water Systems Research’. The seminars will be targeted towards researchers and technical experts working in water resource systems and will be delivered by scientists who have produced acclaimed research in the field. Securing the future of our water resources is becoming less of a problem of scarcity and more of a problem of effective management of what we already have. We strongly believe that this can be achieved only by adopting a systems perspective on water that takes into account the intricate linkages connecting the water system with food, energy, technology, and society. 'Best of Water Systems Research' is aimed at propagating the science and techniques of exactly this approach to sustain our water resources. In this series, WIT will be inviting top researchers who have applied systems theoretic methods to address real problems in water resource management.

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University on his work on participatory irrigation management in Punjab, Pakistan. Other confirmed speakers include Dr. Murugesu Sivapalan from UIUC, Dr. Ariel Dinar from UC Riverside, Dr. Grey Nearing from UC Davis, and Dr. Michael Mitchell from CSU Australia. Many other esteemed researchers are (and will be) invited and we are very excited to be able to learn collectively from their wealth of experiences. 

The talks will (mostly) be delivered bi-weekly on Wednesday evenings. A tentative schedule for the webinars can be found at here, while you can register here. The webinars will be streamed via zoom with the opportunity to interact with speakers during the Q&A after the presentation ends. A link for attending will be sent via email to registered individuals. Colleagues who register once can attend all future talks without the need to register again. 

The first talk will be delivered by Dr. Andrew Bell from Boston University and is titled: "Finding the next steps forward for IBIS water governance". The talk is scheduled for 6:00-7:00 pm PKT on Wednesday, July 28, 2021 and will be moderated by Dr. Talha Manzoor, Assistant Professor, Center for Water Informatics & Technology. 

About the speaker: Andrew Bell studies livelihoods and resource decision-making. including domains of irrigation, pest management, ecosystem services, technology adoption and migration. Most of his work applies survey and experimental tools (games, high-frequency smart-phone based surveys) to identify and model behaviour; and agent-based models to understand what these behaviours imply for system-level outcomes under scenarios of environmental change. He received his PhD (2010) in Natural Resource Management from the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE, now SEAS), also MASc in Environmental Engineering from Waseda University and BASc in Environmental Engineering from the University of Waterloo. 

For more details and queries, contact Soban Hameed Saigol from WIT at soban.hameed@lums.edu.pk.