Professor. Sameh Elsaidi

BIO

Dr. Elsaidi was born in 1984 in Alexandria, Egypt, a 2,300-year-old city known for having housed the largest and most famous library in the ancient world. During high school, he participated in various student competitions and was awarded his school’s prestigious Student Honor Certificate in his final year. He went on to attend Alexandria University (AU)—a highly ranked institution that is the second largest in Egypt—where he was awarded the Undergraduate Distinction of Honor for four successive years and, in 2005, he earned a B.S. degree with distinction and honor, being ranked first among students in the chemistry department and fourth in the university overall.

            Thanks to these achievements, he was hired as a tenure-track assistant professor in AU’s Chemistry Department the following year. (In the Egyptian system, an individual enters the tenure track before receiving the Ph.D.) In that position, Elsaidi honed his skills as an educator, as a result earning the top student evaluations not only in the department but in the university as a whole for four straight years. Then, in 2011, Elsaidi was offered a scholarship by the University of South Florida (USF) to pursue his Ph.D., where Elsaidi remained as a teaching and research assistant in the chemistry department until 2014. Dr. Sameh Elsaidi completed his doctorate in less than four years with a focus on the design and synthesis of metal-organic frameworks and their applications to the separation of gases.

            Dr. Elsaidi's research has received various forms of recognition. Thus he was awarded a U.S. patent for a novel class of porous materials that have demonstrated a unique capacity to capture and separate CO2. Elsaidi has presented this and other research at several high-level conferences and has received a number of awards and fellowships. his teaching has also received recognition, in particular in the form of an award and certificate from USF for my work as a graduate mentor for the undergraduate research program.

            Following graduation, in 2015, Elsaidi returned to his position at Alexandria University. His first initiative was to introduce two new undergraduate courses and one new masters-level course. Dr. Elsaidi then returned to the United States in order to lead a collaborative effort between the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and AU, having been awarded two fellowships by the former institution to fund these joint projects, serving as a visiting assistant professor and research scholar from September 2014 to April 2015 and again from November 2015 to June 2017. As a result of this collaborative research, Elsaidi published 18 joint papers with researchers at the PNNL and AU as well as others at the University of California-Berkeley, the Colorado School of Mines, the University of Limerick, the University of Milan, the University of Singapore, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Argonne National Laboratory, the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and IMDEA Materials.

Before joining the Department of Chemistry at Illinois Institute of Technology, Dr. Elsaidi worked as a Research Scientist at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). His research focuses on the design, synthesis, and applications of functional porous materials, composite materials, and multicomponent membranes. He has over 30 publications and one patent in the field of metal-organic frameworks and their composites for gas separations (CO2, Xe, Kr), aqueous separations (rare-earth elements), gas storage (H2 and CH4), and nuclear waste management (TcO4-, Xe, Kr, Cs+, radiation-resistant materials) and their processing in the form of monoliths, thin-films, membranes, and core-shell composites. His contributions to the field have been recognized by over 1200 citations, an h-index of 18, and several featured works. His recent work has been featured on MIT news "Novel gas-capture approach advances nuclear fuel management | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology", the front page of the Premiere Issue of NETL's Carbon Capture Newsletter "https://netl.doe.gov/sites/default/files/publication/NETL-October-2020-Carbon-Capture-Newsletter.pdf", the NETL's news "Novel Carbon Capture Technology is More than the Sum of its Parts | netl.doe.gov" and the PNNL's news "Form Damages Function and Magnetism Suffers" Dr. Elsaidi was the conference chair and organizer of the "Smartly Engineered Materials International Meeting 2021". In 2017, he organized the International Conference on Chemistry Progress for Sustainable Development in Egypt. He chaired a session on "Chemistry of Materials: Metal Organic Frameworks" at the 2019 ACS meeting. He is also a guest editor for a special issue of Membranes titled "Advances in MOF-based Membranes".