William F. Schneider, whose research uses molecular-level insights to address some of the most pressing challenges in energy and environmental sustainability, has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).
Election to Fellow represents the highest grade of membership within AIChE and honors professional achievement and service to the chemical engineering discipline. He joins Notre Dame professors of chemical and biomolecular engineering Hsueh-Chia Chang (2026), Mark McCready (2024), and Edward Maginn (2018) in receiving this distinction.
After 13 years at Ford Motor Co., where he helped establish the use of advanced atomic-scale modeling to study chemical catalysts, he joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2004. At Notre Dame, he developed computational techniques simulating the way catalysts change and perform under industrial operating conditions.
In a 2017 Science study, Schneider and his collaborators uncovered a key part of how the catalysts that help clean emissions work, demonstrating how copper ions move and pair to remove harmful nitrogen oxides from diesel exhaust. His team also developed more sustainable methods for ammonia production, including research published in Nature Catalysis in 2018.
Schneider has co-authored over 215 peer-reviewed scientific papers with more than 25,000 citations (Google Scholar), and holds five U.S. patents.
In addition to serving as chair of his department for the past six years, Schneider is executive editor for The Journal of Physical Chemistry C, councilor for the American Chemical Society (ACS), and co-organizer of the AIChE Department Heads Forum. He also provides strategic oversight to national research centers, serving on advisory boards for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Institute for Integrated Catalysis and the Center for Programmable Energy Catalysis.
Schneider’s commitment to teaching has been recognized with the 2021 James A. Burns Graduate School Award, the 2023 CISTAR Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, and the 2009 BP Foundation Outstanding Teacher Award.
He will be formally recognized at the AIChE Annual Meeting, Nov. 8-12 at the Minneapolis Convention Center.
—Karla Cruise, Notre Dame Engineering