Robert Brown

Dr. Brown is the founding director of the Bioeconomy Institute (BEI) at ISU, a university-wide initiative that coordinates research, educational, and outreach activities related to biobased products and bioenergy.  The BEI has helped established several new research enterprises at ISU including the NSF-sponsored Center for Biorenewable Chemicals, the Biobased Industries Center, the BioCentury Research Farm, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory Building, the NSF-sponsored EPSCoR project, and the USDA-sponsored CenUSA Bioenergy project.

Dr. Brown also helped establish ISU’s Biorenewable Resources and Technology (BRT) graduate program, the first such degree-granting program in the United States.  He wrote Biorenewable Resources: Engineering New Products from Agriculture, which is used around the world as a textbook for courses in biorenewables (including ISU’s BRT 501).

Dr. Brown’s research focuses on thermochemical processing of biomass and fossil fuels.  BEI has pioneered a variety of innovative technologies including syngas fermentation, gasification of bio-oil, production of sugars, bioasphalt, and co-firing pellets from the fast pyrolysis of biomass, and use of biochars as soil amendment and carbon sequestration agent.

Dr. Brown has published over 120 refereed papers and is PI or co-PI on over $70 million in cumulative research funding.  He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, a Distinguished Iowa Scientist of the Iowa Academy of Science, and the recipient of the David R. Boylan Eminent Faculty Award for Research at ISU in 2002.  He received an R&D 100 Award from Research and Development Magazine in 1997 and is consistently cited among “Top 100” researchers in bioenergy by Biofuels Digest.