Kirkpatrick Award

Awards

The Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award

The aim of the Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement
Award is to recognize and honor the most noteworthy
chemical-engineering technology commercialized anywhere in the world during the two years prior to a given award year. Chemical Engineering magazine has awarded this biennial prize continuously since 1933.

Click here to nominate your company’s technology.

The long and distinguished roster of past winners includes such milestones as Lucite International for its Alpha process for making methyl methacrylate (2009); Cargill Dow LLC: For its production of thermoplastic resin from corn (2003); Monsanto hollow-fiber membranes for gas separation (1981); Union Carbide low-pressure low-density polyethylene (1979); M.W. Kellogg single-train ammonia plants (1967); Linde zeolite adsorbents (1961); Dow Corning silicones (1955), Merck streptomycin (1947); the U.S. synthetic rubber industry (1943) and Standard Oil Development Co. aviation fuels (1939). The most-recent winners’ achievements are summarized in the table.

Although the staff of Chemical Engineering organizes and bestows the award, neither the editors nor others associated with the magazine play any role in the selection or judging of the winner. Instead, the winner is selected by a Board of Judges comprised of current chairs of chemical engineering departments at accredited U.S. and EU universities. The members of the Board of Judges are, in turn, selected by over a hundred Ch.E. department chairs of accredited U.S. and EU universities. It is this unbiased selection process, combined with a more than 80-year tradition that makes the Award one of the most prestigious honors that a CPI company can receive.

The path to the winner

Chemical Engineering magazine is now accepting nominations. Nominations can be submitted by employees at the company being nominated, or by others familiar with the process technology being nominated.

Please submit 500 word nominating brief to:
[email protected]

The 500-word nomination summarizes the achievement, as well as spells out the novelty of the technology and the difficulty of the chemical-engineering problems that were encountered and solved. The nomination must specify how, where and when the development reached its initial commercial status during the two years prior to the award year.

After the deadline, the Secretary reviews the nominations to make sure they are valid; for instance, that the first commercialization did in fact take place during the two years prior to the award year. Then he will submit copies to more than 100 senior professors who head accredited university chemical engineering departments and accordingly constitute the Committee of Award. Working independently of each other, each will vote for what he or she considers to be the five best achievements, without ranking them.

The five entries that collectively receive the most votes become the finalists. Each finalist company is then asked to submit a package of more-detailed information; for instance, a description of the teamwork that brought forth the achievement, a fuller description of the technology, performance data, and exhibits of press coverage.

The Secretary sends copies of these packages to the Board of Judges, which meanwhile has been chosen by and from within the Committee of Award. In late summer, the Chair of that Board will inform the Secretary as to which finalist achievement has been judged the most noteworthy.

The company that developed the technology will then be named the winner of that year’s Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award. The other finalist companies will be designated to receive Honor Awards. The Achievement Award and Honor Awards are bestowed at the CHEM SHOW 2021 in New York City.