October 13, 2004

Hall Receives R.J. Reynolds Award

Dr. Hall

Dr. Carol K. Hall, Alcoa Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University, is the twentieth recipient of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Award for Excellence in Teaching, Research and Extension. Dr. Nino A. Masnari, dean of the College of Engineering, presented Hall with the award in a ceremony held at 3 p.m. Wednesday, October 13, in 1402 Broughton Hall at NC State. The presentation was followed by Hall’s lecture, “Thinking Like a Molecule: Computer Simulations of Protein Aggregation.”

The award was established in 1981 within the College of Engineering to honor a member of the engineering faculty who has demonstrated superiority in several areas of activity that relate to the University’s three-fold mission of teaching, research and extension. The annual award is supported by the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company through the NC State Engineering Foundation Inc. to bring recognition to scientific and educational achievements in fields of engineering. The recipient is given a $25,000 prize distributed over five years.

Noted as a leading researcher in applied thermodynamics and molecular simulation and an outstanding educator, Hall is a woman of many firsts. Not only is she the first woman to receive the R.J. Reynolds Award, she is also one of the first women to be appointed to a chemical engineering faculty in the United States. Hall is known for her talent for developing very simple models to describe complex situations. Her classic, simple-is-better style has led to numerous innovations in thermodynamics and computer modeling that have advanced several areas of research and teaching in chemical engineering.

Hall is credited as a force for modernizing chemical engineering thermodynamics research. She performed the first Monte Carlo simulations of the phase change behavior of hydrogen in metals in the late 1970s and was the first to demonstrate that statistical thermodynamics could be used to describe the behavior of micron-sized particles, explaining why polymer-colloid systems exhibit phases analogous to gas, liquid and solid. With her coworker Gene Helfand, she developed the Hall-Helfand correlation function, a model for polymer conformational state relaxation that has become the standard comparison for NMR relaxation and time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy measurement. In the mid-1980s she developed the Generalized Flory Dimer theory, a simple, physically intuitive approach that builds on the idea that equations of state for chain-like molecules can be assembled by combining the equations of state for segments and groups of segments along the chain. Remarkably accurate in theoretical tests against computer models, the work is considered an important contribution to the advancement of research in polymer equations of state.

Hall is currently focusing her expertise on the formation of ordered protein aggregates called amyloid, a cause or associated symptom of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and the prion diseases (e.g., Mad Cow disease). In a recent breakthrough, she and her students were able to simulate the spontaneous formation of a generic model amyloid in a large system containing 96 peptides. This has excited great interest in the amyloid community because it sets the stage for the addition of in-silico exploration of amyloid formation to the arsenal of experimental techniques currently being used to study these medically important problems.

Hall has formulated new ways to teach thermodynamics, a subject that traditionally intimidates a fraction of students. By introducing students to the idea that almost all thermodynamics problems fit a standard framework, basically a puzzle with missing pieces, and stressing the underlying patterns, she has been able to increase her students’ understanding and appreciation for this core subject.

Hall has directed the research of 25 doctoral and 6 master’s degree students; currently 7 doctoral students work under her direction. She is the author of more than 160 refereed journal articles, which are widely cited (over 4,000 citations) and is on the editorial board of six scientific journals. She served as the director of graduate studies for the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1986 to 1996. A Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, Hall received her bachelor’s degree from Cornell University and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

— weston —

(Photo: Copyright DeLaRosa Photography)

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