The Ashton Hall Cary and Freeman H. Cary Lecture

David Sholl, Executive Vice President for Research, Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, and Professor of Chemistry, Rice University

"How Reliable is the Chemical Engineering and Materials Chemistry Literature?"

Abstract:

Reliability and reproducibility are bedrock principles of quantitative research in engineering and the physical sciences. Systematic efforts testing reproducibility of findings from the peer-reviewed literature in fields including biomedicine and psychology have given striking examples with high failure rates. How relevant are these observations to the chemical engineering and materials chemistry literature? This question has always been important for researchers basing their work on earlier reports, but has even more resonance when considering AI methods that are trained on large collections of published data. I will describe systematic efforts to assess reproducibility in studies of porous adsorbents, and argue that the characteristics of this specific topic are relevant to many areas in chemical engineering and materials chemistry. I will also describe approaches available to individual researchers, reviewers, and journals to improve reproducibility.  

Bio:

David Sholl is the Executive Vice President for Research at Rice University, where he is also a Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and Professor of Chemistry. Prior to joining Rice in 2026 he was Executive Director and Vice Provost of the University of Tennessee Oak Ridge Innovation Institute and Director of the Transformational Decarbonization Initiative at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. From 2022-2023 he was a Strategic Policy Advisor for DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations. From 2013-2021, David was the School Chair of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Georgia Tech. He has published over 400 papers and several books and is the Editor-in-Chief of AIChE Journal. In 2024, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.