October 8, 2024
The Lammot du Pont (1901) Memorial Professorshipin Chemical Engineering was established in 1966 by the du Pont family in memory of Lammot duPont (1901). Mr. duPont, a longtime benefactor of the Institute, was a member of the MIT Corporation from 1928 until his death in 1952. He was president of E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. from 1926 to 1940 and subsequently served as chairman of the board until 1948. Under his leadership, E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. evolved from a specialized producer of industrial explosives to one of the world’s largest and most diversified chemical corporations.
Heather J. Kulik is a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, with a joint appointment in Chemistry. Heather received her BE in chemical engineering from the Cooper Union in 2004 and her PhD from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 2009. She completed postdoctoral training at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University, prior to joining MIT as a faculty member in November 2013. Heather pioneered the integration of quantum chemistry knowledge into machine learning approaches to guide the design and discovery of molecular systems. Her focus has been in inorganic and organometallic molecules, where the challenge in computational chemistry involves multiple transition and spin states involved in bonding of transition metals. She has applied her novel toolset toward rapid, unbiased generation of new catalysts and materials from multi-million molecule databases and extended AI/ML techniques to the area of inorganic materials design, opening possibilities in a broad range of areas, including catalyst, magnetic, electroactive and functional materials design that had been previously unexplored.
Heather’s research has been recognized by an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award and Director’s fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Fellowship in chemistry, an AIChE Computational and Molecular Simulation Engineering Forum Impact Award, and a Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship from the Technical University of Munich, among others. Heather is a key contributor to teaching in the Department and the Institute. She has maintained excellence in the teaching of our core undergraduate course in reaction engineering (10.37), and her elective on computational chemistry (10.437/10.637/5.697/5.698) remains one of the most popular in our Department and of high demand across campus. Heather is active in our Department activities, from graduate recruiting events to the faculty search committee, and has recently taken on the role of co-Chair of our very successful Rising Stars workshop.