The Strategic Energy Institute is excited to welcome Scott McWhorter as a 2023 Distinguished External Fellow. Scott will co-lead the concept development, visioning, partnership, and preliminary capture activities for Georgia Tech on the Department of Commerce Tech Hubs (“Hubs”) and expand Georgia Tech’s hydrogen activities and stature.

Scott is not new to the Georgia Tech campus and has previously worked with Dan Campbell of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) on developing trace organic optical sensors based on evanescent waveguides. More recently, Scott worked with David Sholl (professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech through 2021), to develop the RAPID (Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment) Institute and then through his work with Southeast Hydrogen Energy Alliance (SHEA), started working with Comas Haynes of GTRI on hydrogen, where they brought together the ecosystem that was responsible for at least three hydrogen hub efforts in the South East.

Scott's work related to energy in his own words: 
My career has always related to energy even when I didn’t notice it. I started out in DNA microchips where we tried to understand the various aspects of fluidics (mass transport, thermal, and surface science) that influenced efficient separations. Using the tools from those efforts I transitioned into optical sensor development to monitor trace gases from the gas-solid catalyst interface in a fuel cell electrode to an unknown-unknown contaminant that might cause a failure mode in a weapons system. Over the past decade, my work in energy has focused namely on building partnerships in industrial manufacturing consortia (ManufacturingUSA Institutes) where I helped form both CESMII and RAPID and then focusing on developing technologies to solve the hydrogen storage and delivery challenges through either more efficient, energy dense solid-state storage or using electro magnetics to efficiently provide heat to catalysts to decompose a hydrogen carrier or plastic.

Benoit Montreuil is the Coca-Cola Material Handling & Distribution Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also serves as Director of the Physical Internet Center and Executive Director of the Supply Chain & Logistics Institute. 

Dr. Montreuil is leading the International Physical Internet Initiative, engaging academic, industry and government leaders worldwide into research and innovation projects on smart, hyperconnected and sustainable logistics, supply chains, transportation, businesses and regions. 

His main research interests generically lie in developing concepts, methodologies and technologies for creating, optimizing, transforming and enabling businesses, supply chains and value creation networks to thrive in a fast evolving hyperconnected world. 

He stands at the crossroads of industrial and systems engineering; operations research; computer sciences; operations, logistics, supply chain, strategic management; and sustainability science. His research builds mostly on a synthesis of optimization modeling and mathematical programming, discrete & agent-based simulation modeling, systems science & design theory. 

Dr. Montreuil is a world-renowned scientist who has introduced in collaboration with students and colleagues an imposing set of paradigm-challenging leading edge contributions through nearly four decades of research, shared through 250 scientific publications, 250 scientific communications and numerous keynote speeches at international scientific and professional conferences. He has extensive advisory, entrepreneurial and collaborative research experience with industry and government. 

Through his career, he has received numerous awards, recently including DC Velocity’s Rainmaker of the Year and The Physical Internet Pioneer Award for his outstanding and inspiring vision. 

From 2000 to 2014, Dr. Montreuil has held the Canada Research Chair in Business Engineering. He is a founding member of the CIRRELT Interuniversity Research Centre on Enterprise Networks, Logistics and Transportation. He is also past president of the College-Industry Council on Material Handling Education and its Liaison to the Board of Governors of MHI, the North American industry association of material handling, logistics and supply chain solutions and technology providers. 

Dr. Montreuil graduated in 1978 from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR). He earned a master’s and a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1980 and 1982 respectively. After serving on the industrial engineering faculty of UQTR and Purdue University, from 1988 to 2014, he was a Professor of operations and decisions systems in the faculty of Business Administration at Université Laval in Quebec City, Canada.

Ben Emerson completed his Ph. D. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech in August, 2013. Since then, Ben has worked as a Research Engineer at the Ben T. Zinn Combustion Lab at Georgia Tech. Ben’s research portfolio includes projects on combustion instabilities, alternative fuels, and combustion system R&D with a core focus and motivation of cleaner combustion. Ben’s research primarily consists of three core competencies, which are experimental combustion system development, combustor diagnostics, and combustion theory and modeling. Ben’s combustion system development work spans a wide variety of applications, from small lab-scale burners to combustor rigs that test full-scale gas turbine combustor hardware. His combustor diagnostics work encompasses the state of the art optical diagnostic techniques for reacting flow field measurements and imaging, and aims to implement those techniques in both laboratory-scale and large-scale rig tests. Finally, Ben’s combustion theory and modeling work is geared towards analysis of experimental datasets, development of reduced-order engineering tools, and the development of a suite of hydrodynamic stability analysis tools. Together, these core competencies form the pillars of Ben’s research, which facilitates the design of cleaner-burning combustion systems.

Dr. Chance retired from Global Thermostat at the end of 2022, where he served as a Senior Science Advisor. He continues at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he serves as an Adjunct Professor. Dr. Chance began his career with Honeywell Corporation, holding a number of research positions including Research Manager for Electronic Materials.

In 1986, he joined Exxon as the Director of their Polymers and Fluids Laboratory, later serving as Division Manager for their Paramins Technology division, and as Distinguished Scientific Advisor in ExxonMobil’s Corporate Strategic Research Laboratories. Dr. Chance retired from ExxonMobil in 2006 and joined the Georgia Institute of Technology as a faculty member with a joint appointment in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, continuing also as Distinguished Scientific Advisor Emeritus at ExxonMobil from 2006-2009. 

He joined Algenol Biofuels (2009-2019) as Executive Vice President for Engineering. Dr. Chance's scientific interests are focused on CO² capture and utilization, including Direct Air Capture, as a mitigation strategy for climate change. 

Dr. Chance has organized several international scientific meetings and served on numerous university and industrial advisory boards. He has published over 150 peer-reviewed articles, edited two books, and authored over 30 patents. He was elected Fellow in The American Physical Society in 1988 and was the 2018 recipient of the Lawrence B. Evans Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, an institute level award for career achievement.

Marta Hatzell is a professor of mechanical engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to starting at Georgia Tech in August of 2015, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Material Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign. During her post doc, she worked in the Braun Research Group on research at the interface between colloid science and electrochemistry. She completed her Ph.D. at Penn state University in the Logan Research Group. Her Ph.D. explored environmental technology for energy generation and water treatment. During graduate school she was an NSF and PEO Graduate Research Fellow. 

Currently her research group focuses on exploring the sustainable catalysis and separations, with applications spanning from solar energy conversion to desalination. She is an active member of the American Chemical Society, the Electrochemical Society, ASEEP, and ASME. Hatzell was awarded the NSF Early CAREER award in 2019 for her work on distributed solar-fertilizers, attended the 2019 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium through the National Academy of Engineering, and was awarded the 2020 Sloan Research Fellowships in Chemistry.