Simona Liguori is an Assistant Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Clarkson University and faculty affiliate at the Institute for a Sustainable Environment. She received her PhD and MS degrees in Chemical Engineering from University of Calabria (Italy). She continued her research at the Institute on Membrane Technology (ITM-CNR) - the Italian National Lab - as a Post-Doc researcher and in 2014 she joined Stanford University as a Physical Science Research Associate.
In 2016, she was appointed as Research Assistant Professor at the department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Colorado School of Mines and, in 2018, she continued her career at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the department of Chemical Engineering, where she received a Worcester Polytechnic Institute's Women’s Young Investigator Fellowship and Carbon Footprint Challenge Award. In 2020, she was named a Scialog Fellow for Negative Emissions Science.
Liguori's research interests are focused on development of inorganic membranes and membrane reactors, non-equilibrium reactions, gas separation and negative emission technologies.
She proposes an entirely new avenue for gas separations and catalytic reactions that break the linear scaling relations while addressing critically important environment needs demands. Particularly her research focuses on the synthesis, development and application of i-SMART (innovated System Membrane Advanced ReacTor), where the interactions between catalysis and separation lead to a process intensification allowing for clean energy conversion at milder operating conditions. Metals, alloys, nanoparticles, ceramics, nitrides and carbides comprise the toolkit of materials that can help change the energy landscape.
She has published more than 40 peer-reviewed papers among many other publications, book chapters and conference proceedings. She also holds two U.S. patents.
Current research areas include: 1) design and develop new processes for blue hydrogen production in palladium-based membrane reactor via biofuel reforming; 2) synthesis and characterization of molten salt membranes for ammonia separation; and 3) design of highly intensifies process for ammonia synthesis.