William B. Krantz was born on January 27, 1939, in Freeport, Illinois, U.S.A. He received a B.A. in chemistry in 1961 from Saint Joseph's College in Indiana, a B.S. in chemical engineering in 1962 from the University of Illinois-Urbana, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1968 from the University of California-Berkeley.  He is a registered Professional Engineer. From 1968-1999 he was a Professor of Chemical Engineering and a Research Fellow in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado where he served as the founding Co-Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Membrane Applied Science and Technology. From 2000-2005 he was a Professor and the Rieveschl Ohio Eminent Scholar Chair in Membrane Technology at the University of Cincinnati where he established and served as Director of the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Membrane Applied Science and Technology, NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site Program, and NSF Integrative Graduate Research Education and Traineeship Program. He is now an Emeritus Professor at both the University of Colorado and the University of Cincinnati. In 2005 he accepted the Isaac M. Meyer Visiting Professor Chair in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the National University of Singapore.

He has had visiting faculty appointments at Istanbul Technical University (Turkey, 1974-75); the University of Essex (England, 1975); Aachen Technical University (Germany, 1981-82); the University of Notre Dame (1985); Oxford University (England, 1988-89); the Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, 1989); the University of Twente (Netherlands, 1995-96); Chevron Oil Company (California, 1996); the 3M Company (Minnesota, 1996); the Australian National University (2003 & 2005); Nanyang Technological University (Singapore, 2004 & 2005); and the National University of Singapore (2006, 2007 & 2008).

His professional activities include service as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation (1977-78); the Middle East Area Advisory Committee for the U.S. Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (1977-80); the Publications Board of Chemical Engineering Education journal (1977-84); Chairman of the National Interfacial Phenomena Technical Program Committee of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (1984-87); President of the Southwestern and Rocky Mountain Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1993-94); and the Editorial Board for Arctic and Alpine Research journal (1991-99).

He has been awarded three Fulbright (1974, 1981, 1988), NSF-NATO (1975), and Guggenheim (1988) fellowships. His honors include Special Achievement and Outstanding Performance Awards from NSF (1978); the Westinghouse Award (1980), Rocky Mountain Section Outstanding Teaching Award (1998) and Chemical Engineering Division Dow Lectureship Award (2003) of the American Society for Engineering Education; designation as a Sigma Xi National Research Lecturer (1984-86) and as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1984); the Innovation in Coal Conversion Award of the Pittsburgh International Coal Conference (1987); the Research Excellence Award of the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado (1988); the Excellence in Research, Scholarly, and Creative Work Award of the Boulder Faculty Assembly of the University of Colorado (1995); the John Wesley Powell Lectureship Award (1995) and President’s Award (1999) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; nomination to the Academy of Fellows of the American Society for Engineering Education (1999); the Dow Lectureship Award of the Chemical Engineering Division of the American Society for Engineering Education (2003); the Malcolm E. Pruitt Award of the Council for Chemical Research (2004); and designation as a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (2005). He has received many awards for teaching excellence at the University of Colorado, which include the Teaching Recognition Awards given by the Student Development Association (1972), the College of Engineering (1979), and the Boulder Faculty Assembly (1986). In 1990 he received a lifetime appointment as a President’s Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado.

His research interests include membrane formation and process design, pressure-swing adsorption, scaling analysis in modeling transport and reaction processes, materials processing in low-gravity, global climate change, self-organization in geophysical systems, and biomedical engineering.  He is the editor of three research monographs, the author of over 200 technical papers, co-inventor on five patents, editor of three research monographs, and author of a new book on Scaling Analysis in Modeling Transport and Reaction Processes – A Systematic Approach to Model Building and the Art of Approximation.

[return to Home]