Eleftherios Papoutsakis holds the Eugene DuPont Chair of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. He has made significant contributions in the areas of cell culture engineering, metabolic engineering, genetics and genomics, and cell stem- and T-cell bioengineering.

A graduate of the National Technical University of Athens, E.Papoutsakis received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Purdue University.

Before his arrival at the University of Delaware E.Papoutsakis worked at Northwestern University, where he served as Walter P. Murphy Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering and also was a member of the Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of the Northwestern University Medical School. Prior to that, he was a member of the Rice University faculty.

His research focuses on areas of systems biology, metabolic engineering, experimental and computational genomics with applications in stem-cell biology and prokaryotic biology for the production of biofuels and chemicals from biomass.

He has served on many review boards, journal editorial boards, advisory panels and professional societies in the biochemical and biomolecular engineering communities, including serving as editor-in-chief of Biotechnology and Bioengineering from 1990 to 1996 and currently serving as editor for Biotechnology Advances.

He has also received a number of awards, including the DIC Wang Award for Excellence in Biochemical Engineering (2013), the James E. Bailey Award for Biological Engineering (2012), the International Metabolic Engineering Award and the Elmer Gaden Award (2010).

He won the 2017 E.V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry from the American Chemical Society. The award is sponsored by ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company. The purpose of the Murphree award is to stimulate fundamental research in industrial and engineering chemistry, the development of chemical engineering principles, and their application to industrial processes.

In addition, he is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the American Academy of Microbiology, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers.

Papoutsakis has co-edited two books that have had a significant impact on the field: “Foundations of Biochemical Engineering: Kinetics and Thermodynamics in Biological Systems” (ACS Symposium Series No. 207, 1983) and “Metabolic Engineering” (Marcel Dekker, 1999).

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Greek scientist awarded for his contribution in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry