Clare McCabe, Cornelius Vanderbilt Professor of Engineering, has been elected as a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). She was recognized today at the 2019 AIChE annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.
Fellow is the highest grade of membership awarded by the AICHE and is achieved only through election by the organization’s Board of Directors.
McCabe has served AIChE extensively as a member of the Chemical Technology Operating Council, 2014-2016; the Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum Programming Chair for the 2007 and 2008 annual meetings; Vice Chair and then Chair of CoMSEF, 2008-2010; Area 1a Thermodynamics and Transport Properties Program Chair for the 2011 annual meeting; and she was an elected member of the Area 1a Program Committee, 2006-2011.
McCabe currently serves on the Research and New Technology Committee and, since 2005, she has been is a member of the AIChE-ASME K-7 Joint Committee on Thermophysical Properties, serving as its secretary since 2009.
In research, McCabe is one of the most visible members of the molecular modeling and thermodynamics community in chemical engineering. In molecular theory, she has made seminal contributions to the statistical associating fluid theory (SAFT) equation of state, variants of which have been incorporated into process simulators. McCabe’s work on SAFT began during her Ph.D. work at the University of Sheffield and continues to this day.
Her innovations include applications to alkanes of low molecular weight through to simple polymers and their binary mixtures, perfluoroalkanes, water, esters, carbon dioxide-containing systems, and tethered nanoparticles. Her body of work, both in applying and further developing SAFT, is an extraordinary contribution to the field of molecular thermodynamics.
In molecular simulation, where McCabe pioneered the study of skin lipid self-assembly by molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, her simulations were the first in the field. She has developed and disseminated methodological advances to calculate uniquely predictive and transferable coarse-grained MD forcefields for skin lipids and has used them to study self assembly.
McCabe’s research in this area was honored by a 2018 Chancellor’s Award for Research at Vanderbilt, where she also serves as associate dean of Graduate School and director of Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. Her complete portfolio of research was honored by the 2014 AIChE CoMSEF Impact Award. She has been honored with teaching awards at Vanderbilt, including its most prestigious university-wide Sarratt Award. McCabe joined the School of Engineering in 2004.
Founded in 1908, AIChE is a nonprofit organization providing leadership to the chemical engineering profession representing 60,000 members in industry, academia and government from more than 110 countries.
Contact: Brenda Ellis, (615) 343-6314
brenda.ellis@vanderbilt.edu