Marc-Olivier Coppens is Ramsay Memorial Professor at University College London (UCL) in the UK, since 2012. He is also Vice-Dean Engineering (Interdisciplinarity, Innovation), since 2021, after serving as Head of Department of Chemical Engineering from 2012. Before that, he was on the faculty at Rensselaer (USA) and TU Delft (Netherlands). He is also Qiushi Distinguished Chair at Zhejiang University, China, since 2017.
Marc-Olivier Coppens' multidisciplinary research combines fundamental theoretical work with experiments, centering on nature-inspired chemical engineering, to design and build efficient chemical processes, porous catalysts and separation systems, guided by efficient biological systems. Applications are in the areas of resource efficiency (energy, water and materials), sustainable chemical production, and health. He is the Director of the Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering at UCL, which was awarded a £5M EPSRC "Frontier Engineering" grant in 2013 and a "Frontier Engineering: Progression" award in 2019. Other awards include Young Chemist and PIONIER Awards from the Dutch National Science Foundation (NWO), an RSC Catalysis Science and Technology Lecture Award (Zürich, 2012), the AIChE PTF's PSRI Lectureship Award (2017), and several invited named lectureships, including the DB Robinson Distinguished Lecture at the University of Alberta, Canada (2005), Bent Lecture at the University of Missouri (2010), Somer Lectures at METU (Ankara, 2014), 50th Anniversary Jubilee Lecture at TU Dortmund (2019), and visiting professorships in Norway, China and Taiwan.
A passionate educator, he won the Rensselaer School of Engineering Innovation in Teaching Award in 2012, and a Faculty of Engineering Teaching Award at UCL in 2020. He has published over 160 peer-reviewed journal articles, and given over 50 plenaries and keynote lectures worldwide.
He has been a member of the AIChE since 1998, and served the Institution in many ways, including most recent appointment as the first International Director of the, AIChE’s Catalysis and Reaction Engineering (CRE) Division (2015-), Vice-Chair of the International Committee (2010-2012), Chair of Area 3B on fundamentals of fluidization and fluid-particle systems (2015-2017) , Executive Committee member of PTF, and Director of Chemical Engineering Technology Operating Council, CTOC (2017-2020).
In 2016, he became a Fellow of AIChE. He is also a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (FIChemE) since 2014, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) since 2021, and elected Corresponding Member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences (Germany), since 2018.
He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Elsevier’s Chemical & Engineering Processing: Process Intensification, and serves on the Advisory or Editorial Boards of Powder Technology, KONA and RSC Molecular Systems Design & Engineering, amongst other journals.