Sponsored by Dr. Jesse Zhu and his sister Yan Zhu in memory of their parents X. Bao and Z. Zhu.
The CSChE Bao and Zhu Innovation Award is presented to an individual, who has not reached the age of 40, for a distinguished contribution to the field of chemical engineering while working in Canada.
Nomination deadline for the 2027 CSChE Awards is Aug. 1, 2026, in preparation for the 2027 CSChE conference occurring in May 2027.
View the Terms of Reference and list of Past Winners
The 2027 winner of the CSChE Innovation Award is:
Bruno Blais, MCIC
Polytechnique Montréal
Bruno Blais is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Polytechnique Montréal and holds the Canada Research Chair in Computer-Assisted Design and Scale-Up of Alternative Energy Vectors. His research focuses on developing high-performance numerical methods for computational fluid dynamics (CFD), multiphase flows, and granular systems, combining high-fidelity simulations, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to advance the design and scale-up of chemical and manufacturing processes.
He is the creator and lead developer of Lethe, an open-source, massively parallel, high-order CFD, DEM, and CFD-DEM platform used internationally, and a principal developer of the deal.II finite element library. In 2025, he was a co-recipient of the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering for his contributions to deal.II.
His research bridges fundamental computational science and industrial applications, including chemical processing, sustainable technologies, and advanced manufacturing. He has authored over 70 peer-reviewed journal articles and has supervised or co-supervised 32 graduate students, including 16 doctoral students, as well as nine postdoctoral fellows. Before joining Polytechnique Montréal in 2018, he was a Research Officer at the National Research Council of Canada.