Charles Eckert
Georgia Tech Professor Charles Eckert has a long history of environmental research in sustainability. "I started doing environmental work in the early 70s," says Eckert, who holds the J. Erskine Love Jr. Institute Chair in Engineering. Although environmental research "wasn't at the top of people's minds at the time," he says that he was undeterred. "I thought it was the right thing to do."
Eckert has spent the last forty years doing what he thinks is right, researching and developing sustainable technologies through what many people call "green chemistry," a term Eckert rejects. "It's not green chemistry; it's sustainable chemistry," he says. "It's the merger of good chemistry and engineering and marketing and economics."
According to Eckert, the director of Tech's Specialty Separations Center, sustainable technology is "doing something that is not only beneficial for the environment," but also offers enough benefit for people to adopt it. "It isn't just science," he says. "It's getting people to do science."
To get people to do science, he is currently working with the Imperial College of London, Oak Ridge Laboratories, and other Tech researchers to create techniques to use energy from C02-neutral renewable resources, work that was recently profiled in an article in Science, a leading science publication. He also recently published an article with Philip Jessop from Queens University in Kingston in another leading publication, Nature, on smart solvents, which change properties on command to facilitate applications such as reactions or separations.
Eckert originally came to Tech because of its welcoming attitude toward collaborations with industry, collaborations he believes are critical to developing sustainable technologies. "Tech was way out ahead of the pack—they understood synergy," says Eckert, who won the Presidential Green Chemistry Award in 2004 with his collaborator, Georgia Tech Vice Provost for Research and Dean of Graduate Students Charles Liotta. "Here there's a real love affair between Georgia Tech and the community, industry, and government. That's one of the biggest reasons why I came down here, that culture."
Other reasons why he chose Tech included the ability to work with people he highly admired, including Liotta, whom he met while working for DuPont. Eckert now shares a laboratory with Liotta and their research assistants. "We are combining chemistry and engineering to come up with new solutions," says Eckert, who also enjoys working with others he has met since joining Georgia Tech, including former Director of the Institute for Sustainable Technology and Development Dr. Carol Carmichael, who has served as a liaison for some of Eckert's past projects with Imperial College.
If it sounds like Eckert loves being at Tech, it's because that's true. "I am one of Georgia Tech's biggest fans," he says. "And I have the experience to back it up."
Links
Charles Eckert's Web page at the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering