AIChE’s Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education is named for one of the founders of the chemical engineering discipline. Sponsored by ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Company, the award recognizes distinguished and continuing contributions to chemical engineering education.
The recipient of the 2026 Warren K. Lewis Award is Dr. Doraiswami “Ramki” Ramkrishna, Harry Creighton Peffer Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University. He is being recognized “for outstanding contributions to chemical engineering education and research through books, publications, comprehensive reviews, and training exceptional graduate students for academia and industry.”
Ramkrishna and the other 2026 Institute and Board of Directors’ Award recipients were honored at the 2026 AIChE Annual Meeting.
Above, Dr. Ramkrishna accepts the Warren K. Lewis Award at the 2026 AIChE Annual Meeting.
Ramkrishna earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Bombay in 1960 and his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1965. Before joining Purdue in 1976, he held appointments at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Minnesota. He was named the Harry Creighton Peffer Distinguished Professor in 1994.
About Ramkrishna and his work
Over five decades at Purdue, Ramkrishna has influenced generations of students through classroom teaching, research supervision, and mentorship. He has trained more than 60 doctoral and postdoctoral researchers, with more than 40% going on to academic careers. His former students have also built distinguished careers in industry.
Ramkrishna’s educational impact extends through three major books. Linear Operator Methods in Chemical Engineering, coauthored with Neal Amundson, demonstrated how operator theory could be applied to complex problems in transport and chemical reaction engineering. Population Balances: Theory and Applications to Particulate Systems in Engineering provided a comprehensive treatment of population balance methods and their applications. His most recent book, Cybernetic Modeling for Bioreaction Engineering, coauthored with Hyun-Seob Song, examines the dynamic modeling of metabolic processes.
He has also authored more than 300 research papers and comprehensive reviews spanning applied mathematics, population balances, particulate and biological processes, and cybernetic modeling. His population-balance work has reached industry through short courses at Dow and the incorporation of his solution methods into Fluent software.
Ramkrishna’s previous AIChE honors include the Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research, R. H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering, Thomas Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Systems, and William H. Walker Award for Excellence in Contributions to Chemical Engineering Literature. He is an AIChE Fellow and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2009.
Read about the other recipients of the 2026 AIChE Institute and Board of Directors’ Awards.
