From Left to Right: Chair of the Bernard Lewis Fellowship Committee Benedetta Franzelli, the 2024 Bernard Lewis Fellowship recipients Tao Li, Wei Li, Shaorun Lin, Luna Pratali Maffei, and Jackson Crane, and Former CI President Philippe Dagaut at the 40th International Symposium – Emphasizing Energy Transition.

In this sixth installment of a series of articles, The Combustion Institute recognizes combustion scientists who were honored with medals and awards during the 40th International Symposium - Emphasizing Energy Transition. Jackson Crane (Queen’s University, Canada), Anna Doner (University of Georgia, United States), Tao Li (Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany and University of Cambridge, United Kingdom), Wei Li (Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China), Shaorun Lin (University of California, Berkeley, United States), and Luna Pratali Maffei (Politecnico di Milano, Italy) are the 2024 recipients of the Bernard Lewis Fellowship, established to encourage high quality research in combustion by young scientists and engineers.

Jackson Crane is an assistant professor at Queen’s University where he studies fundamental detonation phenomena and alternative fuels with application to next-generation engines. He did his postdoctoral work at Queen’s University in fuel synthesis via electrocatalysis. He received his Ph.D. and MSc from Stanford University where he studied detonation kinetics and was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Dr. Crane also worked as an Associate at the sustainability-focused non-profit Rocky Mountain Institute, and as an engineering consultant in the nuclear power industry. He received his SB from MIT.

Anna Doner is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Green Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Doner earned her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Georgia in May 2023 under supervision of Associate Professor Brandon Rotavera. Her dissertation research explored chemical kinetics of alkyl-substituted cyclic ethers in combustion-relevant conditions. In 2021-2022, she collaborated with Dr. Judit Zádor, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, CA, with funding from the DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research Fellowship. Her resulting work was published and presented at the Faraday Discussions on Unimolecular Reactions in June 2022 at Keble College in Oxford, England, and the Combustion Institute’s 40th International Symposium in July 2024. Her current work in the Green Group includes mechanism development, kinetic modeling, and training machine learning models on quantum chemistry data to predict chemical properties.

Tao Li is currently a postdoctoral researcher and senior experimentalist at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2021, supervised by Prof. Andreas Dreizler, focusing on investigating solid fuel combustion with multi-dimensional and multi-parameter laser diagnostics. His current research areas cover the advancement of laser diagnostics, ammonia and hydrogen energy, plasma-assisted combustion, and solid fuel combustion for clean power generation. So far, he has published around 30 papers in journals, including Combustion and Flame, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, Fuel, Experiments in Fluids, Measurements Science and Technology, and others.

Wei Li received her Ph.D. degree from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) in 2021 and has been an assistant professor at SJTU since 2023. Her current research focuses on low-carbon fuel combustion reaction kinetics and using this knowledge to derive measures for controlling the combustion process. She has contributed to over 50 journal publications with 700 citations and an H-index of 15 on WOS, including 36 papers in Progress in Energy and Combustion Science, Combustion and Flame and Proceedings of the Combustion Institute. Dr. Li serves as Co-Chair of the Topical Workshop at the 9th National Young Scholar Meeting on Combustion Research, Secretary General of the Local Organization Committee of the 3rd Symposium on Ammonia Energy, and the 21st China Symposium on Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis. She has been honored with the Nomination Award of Distinguished Ph.D. Dissertations of SJTU and the Distinguished Postdoctoral Award of Shanghai Municipality.

Shaorun Lin is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he received his Ph.D. in 2021. His primary research areas are combustion science and fire safety engineering, specifically smoldering combustion and wildfire dynamics. He has co-authored over 40 journal articles and reviewed over 20 journals. He is an editor for the IAFSS website and former president of the SFPE Hong Kong Student Chapter. He is the recipient of the SFPE Student Research Grant (the first recipient from Asia), the Great Bay Area STEM Excellence Award, the Tree Grant from the AFE, the CFPA Best PhD Thesis Award, and the Top Award in the Student Essay Competition from the HKIE.

Luna Pratali Maffei was awarded her Ph.D. in industrial chemistry and chemical engineering in 2022 from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, where she is now an assistant professor in chemical engineering. Her work focuses mostly on the theoretical and kinetic modeling of the combustion of aromatic hydrocarbons and other relevant e-fuels components. During her Ph.D., she visited Dr. Stephen J. Klippenstein at ANL, where she reinforced her expertise in applied theoretical kinetics. Her efforts and achievements in bridging fundamental chemistry and kinetic modeling were already recognized with e.g., the D’Alessio Award for the best Ph.D. thesis from the Italian Section of the Combustion Institute-ASICI (2024) and with the Distinguished Paper Award in the Gas-Phase Reaction Kinetics colloquium at the 39th International Symposium of Combustion (2022). Luna has a track record of 24 publications in peer-reviewed journals and 8 oral presentations at national and international conferences, and she actively collaborates with many international universities and research institutions such as CNRS, RWTH, KAUST, and ANL.

Please join The Combustion Institute in congratulating the Bernard Lewis Fellowship recipients, and the other 2024 award winners honored at the 40th International Symposium. Questions regarding awards may be directed to: office@combustioninstitute.org.