Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering

Research focus

Heterogeneous catalysis, renewable energy, polymers, chemical recycling

Education

Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, University of California Berkeley, 2019
B.S. Chemical Engineering, Arizona State University, 2014

Julie Rorrer will join Chemical Engineering this winter from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Yuriy Roman-Leshkov group as well as a fellow in the MIT Communication Lab. Rorrer is also the founder and lead illustrator of the outreach initiative ColorMePhD, a free resource that uses coloring pages to communicate Ph.D.-level STEM research to a broad audience.

Rorrer’s research focuses on advancing renewable and sustainable chemical production. She leverages tunable heterogeneous catalytic systems in order to enable sustainable chemical transformations, including chemical upcycling of waste plastics and catalytic upgrading of biomass-derived platform molecules. Ultimately, Rorrer’s work aims to mitigate detrimental effects on the environment of waste plastics and reduce fossil fuel consumption in chemical production.