Dr. Sanjoy Banerjee
Professor of Chemical Engineering, City College of New York
Director CUNY Energy Institute
Dr. Sanjoy Banerjee is a CUNY distinguished professor of chemical engineering and director of the CUNY Energy Institute,
whose headquarters is at The City College of New York. The author of more than 200 articles, book chapters and refereed
conference proceedings and the holder of four patents, he has a BS in chemical engineering from the
Indian Institute of Technology and a PhD from the University of Waterloo in Canada. Until March 2008,
Banerjee was professor abovescale in the chemical engineering department, with joint appointments
in the mechanical engineering department and the Bren School of Environmental Science, at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, where he had been since 1980. Banerjee was vice chair of chemical engineering from 1982-84,
chair from 1984-90 and is largely responsible for bringing the UCSB chemical engineering department into the
top 10 in the country. Previously, he held appointments at the University of California, Berkeley,
McMaster University in Canada and Atomic Energy of Canada, ultimately serving as its acting director
of applied science. He is a member of the U.S. Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards,
which is congressionally mandated to maintain oversight over nuclear power.
He also is on the Reference Board of the Norwegian Govt.-Oil Industry Consortium
for Oil-Gas Flow Assurance Project. Banerjee also helped to establish several companies
based on research collaborations, including Metaheuristics LLC (www.metah.com),
which develops highly parallelizable software aimed at very large fluid/thermal simulations,
Mindflash Technologies (www.mindflash.com), which applies artificial intelligence techniques to learning systems software,
and Gas Reaction Technologies Inc. (www.grt-inc.com),
which uses novel metal oxide catalysts to convert natural gas to a variety of liquid products,
including gasoline and benzene/toluene/xylene.
These spinoffs are profitable, with GRT's being recently acquired by a major oil company.
Banerjee also has served or serves as a consultant to several oil companies, including ExxonMobile (Houston),
Shell (Amsterdam), Statoil (Stavanger), Det Norske Veritas (Oslo), Reliance (Mumbai) and ENI (Milano),
as well as many chemical/pharma companies, including Hoffmann LaRoche, Novartis and Novo Nordisk (Denmark).
Sustainable Energy Futures