Deem receives AIChE Professional Progress Award

BY SHAWN HUTCHINS
Special to Rice News

Rice University’s Michael Deem is the 2010 recipient of the Professional Progress Award in Chemical Engineering, one of the highest achievements bestowed by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

	MICHAEL DEEM

Deem, the John W. Cox Professor in Biochemical and Genetic Engineering and professor of physics and astronomy, was recognized for his pioneering theoretical work that brought visionary ideas and new tools to vaccine design, mathematical biology and nanoporous materials structure.

”Professor Deem is a renaissance man of basic and applied research,” said David Hellums, the A.J. Hartsook Professor Emeritus of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who led the nomination. “The depth of his knowledge skillfully blends mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy and engineering to advance life science and medicine, and his work is shedding light on some of the most challenging biological questions of our time.”

By receiving the Professional Progress Award along with the Allan P. Colburn Award in 2004, Deem joins a select group of only eight people nationally who have received both of what are considered two of the highest academic recognitions from AIChE in the last 25 years.

Deem has discovered new methods to quantify vaccine effectiveness and antigenic distance for influenza. His pepitope measure of antigenic distance explains how the influenza vaccine can have both positive and negative efficacy and has shown to be more predictive in characterizing the immune response to vaccine and virus than the gold-standard animal model studies. The work has positioned him as a noted authority on the early detection of new viral strains. Deem also has designed methods to help sculpt the immune system and mitigate immunodominance in cancer and dengue fever via multisite vaccination.

Other seminal contributions to the field include Deem’s exact solution of a quasispecies theory of evolution that accounts for cross-species genetic exchange. The theory quantifies how DNA from one species is introduced into another through horizontal gene transfer and recombination. The work has led to ongoing studies in Deem’s lab to discover new physical theories of competition that show how HIV escapes the immune system.

In the materials field, Deem’s investigations into the nanostructure, nucleation and function of zeolites has changed the way synthetic chemists think about these microporous crystalline solids. He provided the first atomistic simulations of silica nucleation under zeolite synthesis conditions and developed a database of hypothetical zeolite frameworks that contains more than 4 million structures. The availability of such a database of designer catalysts is of significant scientific and industrial value in the oil and gas, petroleum and petrochemical industries.

Deem has more than a dozen patents to his name, has presented his research at more than 200 invited talks worldwide and is the author of nearly 100 peer-reviewed publications and six book chapters. His work has been cited more than 1,900 times.

Deem’s previous honors include being named a Top 100 Young Innovator by MIT’s Technology Review (1999), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2000) and a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar (2002). He is the recipient of the Allan P. Colburn Award from AIChE (2004) and the Vaughan Lectureship in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (2007). Deem is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Founded in 1908, AIChE is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals with more than 40,000 members from around the globe. Its members work in corporations, universities and government and use their knowledge of chemical processes to develop safe and useful products for the benefit of society. More information is available at www.aiche.org.

— Shawn Hutchins is a staff writer in the Department of Bioengineering.