Arthur Ragauskas held the first Fulbright Chair in Alternative Energy and is a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, the International Academy of Wood Science and TAPPI. In 2014, he assumed a Governor’s Chair for Biorefining based in University of Tennessee’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, with a complementary appointment in the UT Institute of Agriculture’s Department of Forestry, Wildlife, and Fisheries and serves in the US Energy and Environmental Sciences Directorate, Biosciences Division, at ORNL. His research program is directed at understanding and exploiting innovative sustainable bioresources. This multifaceted program is targeted to develop new and improved applications for nature’s premiere renewable biopolymers for biofuels, biopower, and bio-based materials and chemicals. His research program has been sponsored by NSF, USDA, DOE, GA Traditional Industry Program, a consortium of industry partners, and several fellowship programs. His Fulbright sponsored activities at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden were focused on the forest biorefinery and new biofuel conversion technologies for lignocellulosics. Currently, Dr. Ragauskas manages a research group of graduate students, postdoctoral research fellows, a research scientist, and visiting scientists. He is the recipient of the 2014 TAPPI Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award and the ACS Affordable Green Chemistry award and his students have won several awards, including the ACS graduate research award.
Ragauskas is an Associate Editor for Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining, Biofuels, BioEnergy Research, Industrial Biotechnology, Taiwan Journal of Forest Service, TAPPI J., Industrial Biotechnology, Holzforschung, Journal of Biobased Materials and Bioenergy, Journal of Petroleum Technology and Alternative Fuels, The Open Biotechnology Journal, Current Biotechnology, and J. Wood Chemistry and Technology. He is an editorial board member of Sustainability and Journal of Chemical Technology and Biotechnology. Ragauskas has served on several advisory boards and review panels including: Austrian Science Fund, European Commission Research Directorate, National Science Academy, J. Paul Getty Trust, NSF, USDA, DOE, ARAP-E, NSERC, TAPPI Research Management Committee, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, Swedish VINN Excellence Center, Swedish Knowledge Foundation, VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, ERA Chemistry, Swiss National Science Foundation, Finnish Academy of Science Norway Research Council, The Technology Foundation STW, Agence Nationale de la Recherche and Singapore Agency for Science, Technology and Research. Dr. Ragauskas has been an invited visiting professor at Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal; Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden; Royal Institute of Technology/ STFi, Stockholm, Sweden; and South China University of Technology, China.