Distinguished chemical engineers join QE Prize panel

TWO chemical engineers - Jinghai Li and Raghunath Anant Mashelkar – have joined the judging panel for the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering (QE Prize), as public nominations open for the prize.

Li, an honorary Fellow of IChemE, and Mashelkar, a former-president of the Institution, bring the total tally of chemical engineers on the 15-person panel to four. They join Lynn Gladden, also an IChemE Fellow, and Hiroshi Komiyama.

The £1m (US$1.42m) QE Prize, now entering its fourth cycle, was first awarded in 2013 to celebrate the very best in international engineering and has been likened to the missing ‘Nobel Prize for Engineering’.

Li obtained a PhD from the Chinese Academy of Science Institute of Process Engineering and went on to establish the energy-minimisation multi-scale (EEMS) model for gas-solid systems.

Mashelkar earned his PhD at the University of Bombay’s Department of Chemical Technology and was a member of India’s Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister for over three decades. He served as IChemE president in 2007/08.

Public nominations for the Prize have opened today and can be submitted online until 18 May, with the winners announced in February next year.

Previous winners of the prize include MIT chemical engineer Robert Langer for his work on controlled release drugs, which have transformed the lives of billions of people (page 5, issue 885); and the five engineers whose work helped create the internet and the worldwide web.

Alongside its unveiling of the new panel members, the QE Prize published research that has warned that economic growth could slow down if the rising gap between demand and supply is not addressed globally. A study that involved feedback from 10,000 people across ten countries highlights the reliance on engineering to drive economic growth.

Markets including the UK (63%), US (59%), China (63%), Germany (62%) and South Africa (67%) all stated that demand for skilled engineers was higher than the supply of jobs.