The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the world’s largest organization for chemical engineering professionals, has awarded one of its most prestigious honors to UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor James B. Rawlings, selecting him for the 2025 John M. Prausnitz AIChE Institute Lecturer Award, an accolade given to a distinguished member who has made significant contributions to chemical engineering in their field of specialization. The selection committee highlighted Rawlings’s “extensive technical contributions to the field of model predictive control,” and commended him for his remarkable accomplishments and well-regarded communication abilities. 

“It’s a thrill to receive any award named after John Prausnitz,” said Rawlings, the Mellichamp Process Control Chair. “John is recognized for his fundamental contributions to molecular thermoydynamics, for which he received the National Medal of Science in 2003, and he is also a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.”

The Prausnitz Lecturer Award charges the recipient to “present a comprehensive authoritative review of the chemical engineering science in his or her field of specialization.” Rawlings’s research interests are in the areas of chemical process modeling, monitoring and control, model predictive control, and molecular-scale reaction engineering. Driven by his groundbreaking research during the past thirty years, model predictive control has become the process industry’s advanced control method of choice, and is estimated to have improved industrial profitability by more than $1 billion per year. Rawlings has written nearly 250 published articles, and his work has been cited more than 51,000 times according to Google Scholar. 

Rawlings was nominated for the Prausnitz Lecturer Award by his UCSB colleague, chemical engineering professor Michael Doherty, who received the Prausnitz Award in 2020 after he was nominated by Rawlings.

“Michael delivered a beautiful lecture, which we taped on campus because this was during the height of the pandemic and AIChE’s annual meeting was held remotely,” said Rawlings, who will present AIChE’s 77th annual lecture in November during the annual meeting. “Michael told me back then that preparing that lecture was a lot of work, and then he nominated me for this award. I think that’s known as payback. But seriously, I am thrilled to receive this award and looking forward to preparing a lecture for the annual meeting.”

An elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Rawlings has received numerous awards recognizing his research and teaching, including the inaugural High Impact Paper Award from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and the John R. Ragazzini Education Award from the American Automatic Control Council. He has also received many of AIChE’s most highly acclaimed honors, including the William H. Walker Award, the Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education, the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award, and the Excellence in Process Development Research Award. Rawlings is also a fellow of IFAC, AIChE, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.