Chemistry Professor Wins DOE Faculty Award
Gerard Dumancas, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry at The University of Scranton, was selected to the highly-competitive U.S. Department of Energy’s Visiting Faculty Program.Gerard Dumancas, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry at The University of Scranton, was selected as a Visiting Faculty Fellow by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Through this highly-competitive program, Dr. Dumancas will have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s leading scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. He will research the development of a more convenient, easy-to-use and inexpensive techniques to estimate biomass components by using existing data bases.
According to Dr. Dumancas, biomass is a chemical mixture of three major chemical components, lignin, hemicellulose and cellulose, in addition to non-structural components.
“The determination of the mass fraction of these chemical components is very important since the amount of these chemical constituents influence thermochemical process functions. We will explore the utility of machine learning regression, deep learning and stacked regression to determine the masses of these biomass chemical components using publicly available datasets,” said Dr. Dumancas.
The DOE’s Visiting Faculty Program is designed to provide an opportunity for faculty members to enhance research capabilities and strengthen science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and learning practices to develop talent to contribute to DOE research areas. The Visiting Faculty Program is sponsored and managed by the DOE Office of Science’s Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists in collaboration with the DOE national laboratories.
Just last year, Dr. Dumancas received a five-year, $1.158 million National Science Foundation funded Noyce Scholars grant to support future STEM high school teachers in high-need school districts. The grant provides scholarships and educational training support to 21 STEM students with a major or minor in secondary education.
During his career, Dr. Dumancas has generated more than $2 million in external research grants and has published more than 40 manuscripts in peer-reviewed academic journals.
Dr. Dumancas joined the faculty at Scranton in the spring of 2022. He earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of the Philippines and his Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Oklahoma State University.
