Contact: Phil Hearn
STARKVILLE, Miss.--Former longtime Georgia Tech professor and research administrator Mark G. White is the new director of Mississippi State's Dave C. Swalm School of Chemical Engineering.
White's appointment as the Earnest W. Deavenport Jr. Chair and school director became effective Jan. 1. He succeeds Clifford George, who served as interim director of the chemical engineering school during 2005.
"The Swalm school is well-positioned to become recognized as one of the leading chemical engineering programs in the Southeastern United States," said White. "It was this sense of imminent success and a record of proven achievements that attracted me to Mississippi State University."
White joins MSU after 28 years at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, where he served both as a professor and director of the Focused Research Program in Surface Science and Catalysis. Before Georgia Tech, he worked for Amoco Oil Co.'s research center near Chicago.
"Mark is an enthusiastic leader who will provide excellent leadership for the Swalm school," said Kirk H. Schulz, dean of MSU's Bagley College of Engineering. "He has an outstanding reputation in his field, and we are honored to have him as a part of our faculty here at Mississippi State."
White has received national and international recognition for his studies in the areas of heterogeneous catalysis, homogeneous catalysis, reaction kinetics and biosurface chemistry.
While at Georgia Tech, White received the Sigma Xi Award as an undergraduate thesis adviser in 1991 and 2002, and as a doctoral thesis adviser in 1988. In 1998, he also received Order of Omega's Outstanding Professor Award.
White authored a textbook, "Heterogeneous Catalysis," which was published in 1990. He has published more than 70 journal papers, holds nine patents, and has supervised more than 30 postdoctoral fellows, doctoral dissertations and master's theses.
White earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1971, a master's from Purdue University in 1973 and a doctorate from Rice University in 1978, all in the field of chemical engineering. His doctoral thesis at Rice was selected for the Sigma Xi Excellence Award in 1978.
The Earnest W. Deavenport Jr. Chair was created by Eastman Chemical Co., where Deavenport served as chairman and chief executive officer. The MSU alumnus is a 1960 chemical engineering graduate.
MSU's school of chemical engineering is housed in the Swalm Building, a state-of-the-art learning facility that opened in the fall of 2000. The school's namesake, Dave C. Swalm, has donated funds for scholarships, endowments and building projects to benefit students studying chemical engineering at the university.
For more information, contact Julie Lemons at (662) 325-8098 or jlemons@engr.msstate.edu.