BYU’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the Department of Chemical Engineering are pleased to announce that Alexis T. Bell of the University of California at Berkeley will visit BYU on March 19 to deliver the annual Reed M. Izatt and James J. Christensen Lecture.
Bell will present two lectures, one general and one more technical. The general lecture titled “The Case for Developing Renewable Energy Sources and the Challenges Ahead,” will explore the current challenges and future opportunities in energy production. The lecture will be held in the BYU Joseph Smith Building auditorium (room 140 JSB) at 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 19.
In his technical lecture, Bell will use examples from his work to illustrate how a combination of experimental and theoretical research provides more progress than either method alone. The technical lecture, which will take place the same day at 11 a.m. in room W-111 of the Ezra Taft Benson building, is titled “The Role of Experimental and Theoretical Methods in the Development of a Molecular Perspective of Catalysis.”
Bell is a faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He is world-renowned in heterogeneous catalysis research, particularly in factors in catalyst structure that would limit them. He uses both experimental methods and quantum chemical calculations to make progress in his field.
After earning his bachelor’s and doctor of science degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell began working at Berkeley in 1967. He has served as both the dean and assistant dean of the College of Chemistry and as the chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering during his time there.