Council Member
Fellow and R&D Director of Catalysis and Adsorbents
Manuela Serban is a UOP/Honeywell Technologies Fellow and the Director of Catalysis and Adsorbents in Research. She joined UOP 22 years ago, and before joining the management team, she held positions in Research and Development, where she commercialized several catalysts for various process technologies, including reforming, light paraffin dehydrogenation, olefin cracking, and alcohols to jet. Currently, she manages a team of chemists, engineers, and molecular modelers developing next-generation catalysts and adsorbents across the UOP/Honeywell Technologies portfolio using experimental and theoretical approaches.
Before UOP/HONT, she completed a postdoctoral appointment at Argonne National Laboratory, working on hydrogen production from the pyrolysis of natural gas and thermochemical water-splitting cycles.
She has a BS/MS in Chemical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania, and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts. She holds 56 US patents and multiple active patent applications.