Professor Paula T. Hammond will be the 41st speaker for the series. She is the Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and David H. Koch Chair Professor in Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  She is the first woman and the first person of color appointed to this post. Professor Paula Hammond was elected into the 2013 Class of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the recipient of the 2013 AIChE Charles M. A. Stine Award, which is bestowed annually to a leading researcher for outstanding contributions to the field of materials science and engineering.