Professor Henry Curran, the Chief Technical Advisor for the Computational Chemistry Consortium (C3), was recently awarded the 2017 Boyle Higgins Gold Medal Award. The Institute of Chemistry of Ireland bestows this prize on a chemist working in Ireland or an Irish chemist working overseas who has made an “outstanding and internationally recognized research contribution to the advancement of chemistry.” After receiving the award, Professor Curran gave a lecture titled Developing Detailed Chemical Kinetic Mechanisms for Fuel Combustion to the Institute.

Professor Curran, who is also the director of the Combustion Chemistry Centre and the Priority Research Area leader in Energy at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), studies the chemistry of combustion with the aim of improving efficiency and reducing emissions. His research emphasizes a fundamental understanding of combustion chemistry at the molecular level to guide the design of more efficient combustors.