The award includes a plaque that will be presented during a special ceremony at the 32nd Council for Chemical Research annual meeting May 1-3 in Detroit, Mich.

The Malcolm E. Pruitt Award has been given annually since 1985 to recognize outstanding contributions to research progress in the chemical sciences and engineering while interacting among industrial, academic and government research sections.  Rousseau is the 3rd Georgia Tech engineering professor to receive this award.

Rousseau has served as chair of ChBE since joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1987. He also has served two terms as interim director of the Institute of Paper Science & Technology at Georgia Tech. 

Previously, he was a faculty member at North Carolina State University and a visiting professor at Princeton University. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. His research has explored numerous areas related to separation processes and resulted in more than 190 journal articles, book chapters, and monographs and more than 250 presentations at technical meetings and seminars for industry and universities.

Among his many awards and honors, Rousseau received the Warren K. Lewis Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the Clarence G. Gerhold Award from the Separations Division of the AIChE and the Forest Products Award given by the Forest Products Division of AIChE. He is a fellow of both AIChE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was selected for the LSU Engineering Hall of Distinction. On the occasion of the AIChE Centennial, he was cited by AIChE as one of 30 authors of groundbreaking chemical engineering books. In January 2010, he was awarded a Docteur Honoris Causa by L’Institut National Polytechnique de Toulouse.