Professor Clare McCabe Receives 2025 PPEPPD Prausnitz Award
The prestigious 2025 PPEPPD Prausnitz Award has been awarded to Professor Clare McCabe of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. The award recognizes her outstanding, long-term contributions to the field of thermodynamics and her exemplary leadership in chemical engineering and the broader scientific community.
Awarded every three years at the International Conference on Properties and Phase Equilibria for Product and Process Design (PPEPPD), the Prausnitz Award is one of the few honors in the field bestowed directly by peers from the thermodynamics research community, rather than by an interdisciplinary panel. This makes the recognition a unique expression of esteem from fellow experts in molecular thermodynamics.
Professor McCabe is recognized "for sustained, impactful research in thermodynamics across multiple disciplines using a combination of molecular theory and molecular simulation, and for inclusive leadership in chemical engineering and sciences." Her contributions over more than two decades span the development of molecular-based equations of state and pioneering simulations of complex fluid behavior.
Her early work, including the application of the SAFT-VR equation of state to mixtures relevant for process design, laid the groundwork for subsequent breakthroughs in modeling polar, ionic, and continuous mixtures. She has made significant contributions to the understanding of lubricant behavior under extreme conditions, and she regularly teams with experimentalists and achieved the first experimental validation of non-equilibrium molecular dynamics (NEMD).
Beyond her scientific achievements, Professor McCabe has led multi-institutional collaborations and provided insight that underpins several industrial patents in the pharmaceutical and materials sectors. As Editor-in-Chief of Fluid Phase Equilibria, she has shaped the direction of thermodynamics research globally.
This award marks a celebration of her scientific excellence and her dedication to fostering inclusive scientific communities.