Vol. 19, No. 28 |
April 20, 2000 |
Two faculty gain national professional recognition
 Two UD faculty members, Henry C. Foley, chemical engineering and Center for Catalytic Science and Technology, and Cort J. Willmott, geography, have been honored by awards by professional organizations in their respective fields.
Foley has been selected to receive the Excellence in Catalysis Award, given by the Catalyst Society of Metropolitan New York and sponsored by the ExxonMobil Research & Engineering Co. The award consists of a plaque and a $1,200 gift and will be presented at the society's May meeting when Foley will speak. The award recognizes outstanding contributions in either applied or basic research in homogeneous or heterogeneous catalysis. Foley's research is involved in exploring catalysis, reaction engineering and basic materials research with a strong interest in carbon and its various forms. He is cited for his work with rhodium and molybdenum-supported metals, hydrogen permselective membranes and nanoporous carbon for separations and catalysis. A graduate of Providence College with a master's degree from Purdue University and a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University, Foley worked for American Cyanamid before joining the UD faculty in 1986. He has published extensively in his field and holds several patents. Among his professional honors, he received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1987, Research Innovation Recognition Awards from Union Carbide and was selected for the Ernest W. Thiele Lectureship in Chemical Enigineering at the University of Notre Dame and the DuPont Lecture in Reaction Engineering in 1997. The Association of American Geographers has awarded Distinguished Scholarship Honors to Willmott at its annual meeting in Pittsburg, April 8.
Willmott has made contributions to understanding climates and climatic variability over extensive geographic domains. Working with graduate students and colleagues, he has evaluated thousands of weather-station records and produced large-scale, air temperature and precipitation climatologies. His research has shown that the Earth's surface received more precipitation than was thought, especially over tropical South America and where there is abundant snowfall. He and his colleagues also have demonstrated that the Earth's land surfaces are cooler, on the average, than is apparent in weather-station records alone, because the Earth's cold regions are underrepresented in weather-station networks. Willmott also devised a computer program for a water-budget accounting system, devised by geography professor emeritus John R. Mather, for estimating evapotranspiration, soil moisture, water surplus and other related topics. This computer program has been used by scientists to understand large-scale hydroclimatic variability. Willmott has been active professionally in the Association of American Geographers, a scientific and educational society, founded in 1904, which has 6,500 members who share interests in the theory, methods and practices of geography. |
Wilmott was honored for his research on global climate and its variability, land-surface processes and climate and the evaluation of climatic model performance. He also was cited for his mentoring of young scholars and his other professional accomplishments.