Geoffrey L. Price

Emeritus Professor of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University

Emeritus Professor of Chemical Engineering a University of Tulsa

Short History

Dr. Price was born in LaMarque, Texas on May 26, 1953, but he calls Texas City, Texas his home and rightly so. His parents, Jerry L. Price and Florene (Koeninger) Price were living in Texas City when he was born, and LaMarque borders Texas City and LaMarque was simply where the hospital was.

Dr. Price grew up in Texas City, learning to hunt, fish, ride a bike and do all the things little boys did back in the 50's and 60's. He went to elementary school at Roosevelt-Wilson Elementary, then to Blocker Junior High, and finally to Texas City High School where he graduated in 1971.

As he studied in junior high and high school, he found he had a passion for technical subjects, especially mathematics and chemistry, though he also was a member of both the marching and symphonic bands and even took woodworking at high school. His father, Jerry, a respected chemical engineer at Monsanto Chemicals at that time, helped to encourage young Geoffrey to take up chemical engineering as a career by occasionally taking him out to the chemical plant to see interesting things going on there like blow molding, styrene distillation, and computer control of processes which was very early in the applied computing field. When he finished high school, Dr. Price decided to enroll in the chemical engineering program at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

At Lamar, his studies quickly became his complete focus. He found that without external distractions surrounding high school, he excelled at his studies and became a Dean's list student every semester. He learned to do research work at Lamar, working part-time in the catalysis labs of Professor Jack Hopper. He also was a co-op student working for B. F. Goodrich Chemical Company. Further shaping his later decisions in life was the fact that the other students at Lamar came to him for help with many subjects, and they all praised him for his ability to convey difficult material to them in an understandable form. Dr. Price finished his BS in chemical engineering at Lamar with the distinction magna cum laude in 1975.

Having decided to go to graduate school to seek a PhD in chemical engineering so that he could explore academics as a career, he met Professor Joe W. Hightower at Rice University in Houston, Texas upon the urging of his father. His father had worked some at Monsanto with Dr. Hightower who was a consultant there. Impressed with the labs at Rice, he applied and won a research assistantship to study there. Entering Rice in 1975, he quickly became the most skilled experimentalist in the heterogeneous catalysis labs of Dr. Hightower. He chose to work on tellurium loaded zeolites for his PhD research work and he finished his PhD at Rice in 1979, submitting the PhD dissertation: "The Active Nature of Tellurium Zeolite Dehydrocyclization Catalysts".

During the last year of his study at Rice, Dr. Price interviewed at several universities hoping to land a professorship. When he got an offer from the Chemical Engineering Department at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge, he jumped at the opportunity. So, in the spring of 1979 at the young age of 25, he arrived at LSU, accepting the position of Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering. Dr. Price immediately began teaching and building a research lab. Grants and journal publications began to flow in and a pivotal point in his career was in 1984 when he was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor.

In 1984, he met Dr. Judy Chan who was a researcher at Smith-Kline in Philadelphia at the time and came to LSU to give a research seminar. Shortly thereafter, he got an offer to work in the zeolite synthesis labs at Mobil Corporation in Princeton, New Jersey for the summer of 1985. Drs. Chan and Price were able to meet for personal time together during that summer, and to make a long story short, they decided to get married in early Fall of 1985 and became husband and wife. Back in Baton Rouge, Geoffrey and Judy began a family with Jerry Loyd Price, II (named after Geoffrey's father) in 1987, then Joseph Frederick Price in 1990, and then David Kenneth Price in 1992. All of these sons eventually became engineers.

In 1989, Dr. Price met Dr. Vladislav Kanazirev when he took a visiting appointment at LSU from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. This spawned a tremendous research collaboration that spanned the decade of the 1990's. Also during that time frame, Dr. Price became a consultant for Exxon Corporation, and he worked closely with several researchers including Al Schweitzer, Harry Robson, and especially Enrique Iglesia. Dr. Price was able to spend considerable time at Exxon Research and Engineering in Clinton, New Jersey in the summers of 1987, 1988, and 1989 working with Dr. Iglesia.

In 1992, Dr. Price was promoted to Professor at LSU and was later awarded the Robert Hughes Harvey Endowed Professorship in 1998.

In 2000, Dr. Price became Chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Tulsa (TU). Over the next two decades, he achieved significant milestones, including securing two endowed professorships: The Paul Buthod Professorship and the Wayne Rumley Chair and Professorship, which he held until 2020. He also played a key role in attracting gifts that led to the department’s renaming as the Russell School of Chemical Engineering and oversaw the remodeling of Keplinger Hall’s office and research spaces.

Dr. Price now lives with his wife in Fulshear, Texas near two of his sons who live in Richmond, Texas along with 5 grandchildren, Nolan, Lucy, Emily, Tommy, and Natalie.