“David’s background, experiences and outstanding reputation in fields critical to the school make him ideally suited and well-prepared to lead the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering during the next era,” said Dr. Gary S. May, dean of the College of Engineering. “He is an ideal match for the school’s high aspirations both nationally and internationally. David’s work in energy sustainability is internationally recognized and he will continue to advance this area as one of our key strategic research initiatives for the school and Georgia Tech.”

As the new chair, Sholl will oversee a school that is ranked in the nation’s top ten most prominent programs of its kind in both graduate and undergraduate education. The school enrolls more than 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students and has more than 40 faculty participating in 20 interdisciplinary research centers. “Our school has a phenomenal group of faculty, students, and alumni. I am privileged to have the opportunity to work with all of them to move the school from its current successes to even greater successes in the future,” said Sholl. “Our discipline is in the middle of a renaissance in the U.S., and Georgia Tech is poised to play a key role in technology development and industrial practice as this trend continues.”

Sholl earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado and did postdoctoral research at both Yale University and Penn State University. Before coming to Georgia Tech, Sholl had been a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. He joined the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering faculty at Georgia Tech in January  2008 where he also serves as the associate director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute.

Sholl has received numerous awards including a NSF CAREER Award, the DOE Hydrogen Program R&D Award, and an Early Career Achievement Award in Computational Molecular Science and Engineering  from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He was also an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and a Faculty Fellow at the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

His research group has published in the areas of computational materials modeling, porous materials for carbon capture applications, membranes for gas separations and heterogeneous catalysis. Sholl has published more than 220 papers with over 7000 citations and has given more than 160 invited conference talks and seminars. He is currently a senior editor for Langmuir (an American Chemical Society journal), and chair of the Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum, in the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Sholl has served as the research and thesis advisor to more than 80 students at the bachelor’s, master’s, doctoral and postdoctoral levels.

The College of Engineering at Georgia Tech is the largest of its kind in the country with more than 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled. The college ranks in the top five in undergraduate and graduate engineering education by U.S. News and World Report.