Karthish Manthiram is the Bren Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, and the Exeuctive Officer for Chemical Engineering at Caltech. The Manthiram Lab is focused on the development of electrified catalysts for the sustainable synthesis of molecules that go into constructing the physical world, including plastics and fertilizers, using renewable feedstocks. Karthish received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University in 2010 and his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 2015 with Prof. Paul Alivisatos. After a one-year postdoc at the California Institute of Technology with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in 2017. In 2021, he moved to Caltech as a Full Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry. In 2022, he was named the Director of the Solar Science and Catalysis Center in the Resnick Sustainability Institute. In 2025, he was named the Bren Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry and started as Chair for Chemical Engineering.

Karthish's research and teaching has been recognized with several awards, including the Moore Inventor Fellowship, DOE Early Career Award, NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Infosys Prize, MIT Chemical Engineering Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award, and MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Award. It is our pleasure to welcome Prof. Manthiram to PodCAT!

Prof. Michael S. Wong, Ph.D, is the Tina and Sunit Patel Chair in Molecular Nanotechnology and professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University. He is also professor in the Departments of Chemistry, of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and of Materials Science and Nano Engineering. He received his education and training at Caltech, MIT, and UCSB. He is Research Thrust Leader in the Rice WaTER Institute and Director of the Rice PFAS Abatement and Replacement Center (Rice PAR). His research program tackles water, sustainability, and energy issues through chemical engineering, materials chemistry, and heterogeneous catalysis approaches. He develops thermal/photo/electro-catalysis technologies to de-construct molecules, i.e., treat water of undesirable contaminants like drycleaning and industrial solvents, fertilizer runoff, and PFAS. His Catalysis and Nanomaterials Laboratory has generated over 220 publications, cited cumulatively over 20,000 times (h-index > 75). He received the 2023 AIChE Lawrence K. Cecil Award, the highest environmental honor in chemical engineering, the International Precious Metals Institute's 2025 Henry J. Albert Award for pioneering precious metal catalysis for clean water applications, and the 2025 AIChE NSEF Award, the highest nanotechnology honor in chemical engineering. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). He serves on the ACS Society Committee on Publications, and as an executive editor for the ACS journal Environmental Science and Technology. It is our pleasure to welcome Prof. Wong to PodCAT!

Prof. Steven Chavez is an Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UCLA. His long-term career goal is to develop tools and model systems to advance mechanistic understanding of dynamics in heterogenous catalysis. Prior to UCLA, he was previously an Arnold O. Beckman postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to Stanford, he received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, a Ford Foundation Fellow, a Rackham Merit Fellow, and a Rackham Predoctoral Fellow. Outside of research, he is a strong advocate for increasing diversity in STEM. He has 14+ years of experience conceiving, planning, and executing programs/events to improve the recruitment and retention of first-generation, low-income students in STEM fields. At UCLA, Steven works with the Chicano Studies Research Center to implement and evaluate programs to help UCLA reach its goal of becoming a Hispanic Serving Institution. It is our pleasure to welcome Prof. Chavez to PodCAT!