Two new tenure-track faculty members will join the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) at Rice University.
They are among this year’s 21 new faculty hires in the George R. Brown School of Engineering. This latest group of researchers and teachers further establishes the school’s prominence in its key research areas: health and well-being, energy and sustainability, resilient and adaptive communities, advanced materials, and future computing.
The new members of the ChBE faculty are:
Jason Adams, assistant professor: He earned his Ph.D. in ChBE from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2022 and has since served as a postdoctoral research associate at the California Institute of Technology. His research interests include catalysis for the decarbonization and electrification of chemical manufacturing and wastewater treatment. He combines reactor engineering, operando spectroscopy, and material synthesis to develop design principles relating the structures of catalytic interfaces to their performance. He will join the Rice faculty on Jan. 1, 2025.
Stavroula (Alina) Kampouri, assistant professor: She earned her Ph.D. in chemistry and chemical engineering in 2020 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. Since then, she has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at MIT. Her research interests include the design of porous, functional materials (e.g., metal-organic frameworks), exploring their structure-property relationship and applications in semiconductor technologies for environmental problems. Applications include light-driven catalysis for fuel synthesis, valorization of waste and remediation of water. She will join the Rice faculty on Jan. 1, 2024.