For more than four decades, Professor Koros has been a leader in research, scholarship, and education of practitioners in energy-efficient separations. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Membrane Science for 17 years. He has championed the use of separation processes that reduce energy consumption and emissions of carbon dioxide by reducing the energy intensity per unit of product produced. His contributions have led to major innovations in materials, device engineering, and process integration.
Dr. Koros’s academic career, spanning service at North Carolina State University, University of Texas at Austin and Georgia Institute of Technology, has focused on fundamentally changing energy intensive separation paradigms for energy intensive gas separation processes. His strategic approach to focus first on debottlenecking of existing processes using compact energy-efficient membrane and sorbent devices enables an evolutionary route to a true revolution in separation processes. In the face of large capacity expansions, driven by the recent availability of natural gas resources, his contributions have helped the US to lead the world to a more sustainable future. His leadership has shown the way to transition to clean natural gas for fuels and value-added commodities. Membrane and sorbent approaches pioneered by Koros combine core fundamental thermodynamic and transport principles with emerging materials and processing principles to create devices that enable this transition.
In 2004, his AICHE J perspective article, “Evolving beyond the thermal age; Membranes can lead the way” called attention to the opportunity to achieve a competitive cost advantage while reducing CO2 emissions as an environmental bonus. He has transferred his vision and approach to many PhD, MS and post-doctoral researchers who are now in leadership roles as change agents in industry and academia. High-efficiency hollow-fiber membrane and sorbent modules, suitable for feeds of a billion standard cubic feet per day, are enabling tools resulting from his work. Most recently, revolutionary carbon molecular sieve materials, created as thin-skinned asymmetric hollow fibers, now open a path to sub-angstrom size resolution many gas pairs. Achieving sub-angstrom scale separations for mega-ton scale feeds is only possible by integrating materials development, materials processing and processing engineering open the door to a whole new generation of large-scale energy-efficient separation processes. His ability to not only focus on fundamentals, but also to integrate them into novel devices is one of his key contributions. With over 500-referred publications and more than 37 issued US patents, Dr. Koros has contributed a scholarly and practical body of information to implement his vision and example. Dr. Koros was recognized with the AIChE Institute Award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology in 1995 and the AIChE Separation Division’s Clarence Gerhold Award in 1999. He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2000 and named a Fellow of AIChE and AAAS in 2002 and 2003, respectively. He received the North American Membrane Society’s Alan Michaels Award for Innovation in Membrane Science and Technology in 2008. He received the William H. Walker Award in 2010 and was the 63rd Institute Lecturer for AIChE in 2011. He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2024 International Congress on Separation and Purification Technology.