Professor Masel retired after 32 years of working on the Chemical Engineering faculty of the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and is now CEO of Dioxide Materials, a company that is developing technology for CO₂ recycling and sensing.  Masel is one of the most highly cited chemical engineers in the country with over 250 publications, 400 talks, 25 issued and allowed patents, two major textbooks and an h index over 50.  He is listed in http://highlycited.com as doing the work that has had the most impact since 2000. He holds major awards from the AIChE, ACS and NSF,  Over 200 news articles have been written about Masel's work, including news articles in Science, Nature, Nature Climate change, Scientific American, PC World, Wired, Motor Trend, Chemistry World. R&D Magazine, Investors Daily,  and People's Daily (China).   Over the years,  Masel has done work in catalysis and surface chemistry of film growth and more recently on fuel cells and  Electrochemical CO₂ conversion.  Masel is a founder of three different companies:  Tekion, a fuel cell company, and Cbana Laboratories, a homeland security device company, and Dioxide Materials, a company focused on the production of fuels, chemicals, and foods from CO₂ and water.   Masel is also an outstanding mentor of graduate students, as evidenced by the 20 graduate students and post-docs from Masel's group who accepted faculty positions since 2000. 

 Rich received both a Bachelor of Science Degree and a Master's of Science Degree  in Chemical Engineering from Drexel University  in 1972 and 1973 respectively, a PhD in Chemical Engineering from UC Berkeley in 1977, and a post-Doc in Physics from Technishe Universitat Müchen.