Dr. Joseph M. DeSimone W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemical Engineering at North Carolina State University has been named as the 2004 North Carolina American Chemical Society Distinguished Lecturer. This award is presented annually to a Local Section ACS member who has made significant and recognized research contributions to the chemical sciences. Dr. DeSimone will present a lecture at the upcoming North Carolina-ACS Sectional Conference at Duke University on April 17th, 2004.
For someone under 40 years old, Joe's achievements have been nothing less than phenomenal. At the very beginning of his independent career, he invented a process for polymerizing tetrafluoroethylene in supercritical carbon dioxide. This process for making Teflon is now used by DuPont in a factory in eastern North Carolina. In the past, Teflon was made by polymerization in Freon solvents, but such solvents are now outlawed. Polymerization in aqueous emulsions proved to be less than satisfactory, so Joe's process was greatly welcome, especially since it is also very clean, environmentally.
It turns out that, while liquid or supercritical carbon dioxide is not a good solvent for hydrocarbons or molecules with sizable hydrocarbon tails, it is a good solvent for fluorocarbons. Based on this fact, DeSimone devised detergents useful to make hydrocarbons compatible with CO2: molecules that, like soap, have a hydrocarbon tail but, unlike soap, have a fluorocarbon head. These detergents turned out to be a bonanza in Dry Cleaning: they can be used to clean greasy clothes in liquid carbon dioxide in lieu of the environmentally and health-wise undesirable chloroethylenes. We see this application in the Hangers Dry Cleaning establishments in this region and elsewhere. DeSimone's detergents also allow liquid CO2 to be used for degreasing instruments and in many other processes. More recently Joe has pioneered the potential use of liquid carbon dioxide in microlithography.
Perusal of DeSimone's publications list shows a lot of other interesting work, much of it more basic than that mentioned above; it also shows that Joe expands his horizons by collaborating with scientists in other fields.
Joe has already received numerous awards, of which I would stress the Wallace Carothers Award in 2002, the O. Max Gardner Award in 2000, the Fresenius and the Carl S. Marvel Awards in 1999, his honorary degree, also in 1999 and, above all, the Presidential Green Chemistry Award from the EPA in 1997.