Dr. Michael A. Serio, President

Dr. Serio holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering ("with distinction") from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since he joined AFR, Dr. Serio has been a Principal Investigator on experimental and/or modeling studies on the pyrolysis, gasification, liquefaction, and combustion of biomass, waste materials, and coal; jet fuel thermal stability; pyrolysis of biomass and waste materials; synthesis of fullerenes; pollution formation in combustion systems; FT-IR monitoring of combustion systems; advanced fire detection methods; and polymer thermal degradation. For several years, he led the team which developed AFR's widely used FG-DVC model for the pyrolysis of coal, biomass and related materials. Dr. Serio has been a Principal Investigator or Program Manager on contracts and grants for the NSF, DOE, DOD, EPA, NASA, NIST, DEd, and USDA. He was, for several years, a member of the Advisory Committee for the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Connecticut and the editorial board for the Journal, Fuel. Dr. Serio has served as Program Chair, Program Secretary, and Trustee for the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Energy and Fuels and received the Distinguished Service award in 2008. He also served as a member of the joint CCR/ACS/AIChE task force on the DOE energy research budget. and was a consultant on a five year fuel research project sponsored by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (1996-2001). Dr. Serio has authored or co-authored six patents and more than 170 publications, including two encyclopedia chapters. He was the senior editor of a book titled "Synthesis and Characterization of Advanced Materials," that was published by the ACS in 1998 and which is now available from Oxford University Press.