Diane Hildebrandt is currently the Director of the Institute for the Development of Energy for African Sustainability (IDEAS) and a Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of South Africa (UNISA). She is a Distinguished Professor at the Hebei University of Science and Technology (HEBUST) and the Director of the International Joint Research Laboratory of New Energy at HEBUST. Diane Hildebrandt obtained her BSc, MSc and PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She has authored or co-authored just under 200 scientific papers, including an invited paper in Science, and has supervised over 100 postgraduate students.
She was awarded the President’s Award by the Foundation for Research and Development and the Distinguished Researcher Award by the University of the Witwatersrand in 1996. In 1997 she became the first engineer to be awarded the Royal Society of South Africa’s Meiring Naude Medal. In 2000 she and a colleague were the first academics to be awarded the Bill Neale-May Gold Medal by the South African Institute of Chemical Engineers. In 2002 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa and also received the Vice Chancellor’s Research Award of the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2003 she was elected as a member of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (ASSAf). In 2005 she was recognized as a world leader in her area of research when she was awarded an A rating by the National Research Foundation. In 2006 she was elected as Fellow of the South African Academy of Engineering (SAAE). In 2009 she won the Distinguished Woman Scientist Award from the Department of Science and Technology and the African Union Continental Scientific Award in the category Basic Science, Technology and Innovation. In 2010 she was awarded the ASSAf ‘Science-for-Society’ Gold Medal Award. In 2017 she was conferred the NSTF Research and Capacity Development award. In 2017 she was appointed as one of 100 Foreign Experts to advise the Government of Hebei. In addition, she was honoured to be chosen for the China National Talent Programme for Foreign experts in 2018 and she is presently the only African to be so honoured.
In 1998, she became the first woman in South Africa to be made a full professor of Chemical Engineering when she was appointed as the Unilever Professor of Reaction Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand. In 2003 she became the first woman professor of Chemical Technology in the Netherlands when she was appointed as a part-time Professor of Process Synthesis at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. She was South African Research Chair of Sustainable Process Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa from 2005 to 2013. She has worked at the Chamber of Mines, Sasol and the University of Potchefstroom, and has spent a sabbatical at Princeton University, USA. Her research area is the design of energy efficient processes, with the view to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. She is particularly interested in how she can apply the results of her research to improving the lives of those who do not have access to energy and clean water. This involves working with multidisciplinary teams to understand the social, economic and technological barriers to the adoption of new technologies.