2026 Recipients Bernard Lewis Fellowship

The Combustion Institute recognizes combustion scientists who were honored with medals and awards during the 41st International Symposium on Combustion.

Hongchao Chu (RWTH Aachen University, Germany), Fabiola Citrangolo Destro (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Fabian P. Hagen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany), Yuxuan Ma (University of Tokyo, Japan), Andrea Nobili (Stanford University, United States), and Zhiyong Wu (Lund University, Sweden) are the 2026 recipients of the Bernard Lewis Fellowship, established to encourage high quality research in combustion by young scientists and engineers.

Hongchao Chu
Hongchao Chu is a research group leader at the Institute for Combustion Technology, RWTH Aachen University. He received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from RWTH Aachen University in 2023 under the supervision of Prof. Heinz Pitsch. His research focuses on simulations and physics-based and data-driven modeling of turbulent combustion for sustainable fuels, including hydrogen, ammonia, and metal particles. He has published 24 peer-reviewed journal papers, including in Combustion and Flame, Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, and Journal of Fluid Mechanics. His work on thermodiffusive instabilities in hydrogen engines received the Distinguished Paper Award at the 39th International Symposium on Combustion.

Fabiola Citrangolo Destro
Fabiola Citrangolo Destro is a postdoctoral researcher at Politecnico di Milano, leading the MSCA project KINMECPRO. Her work centers on valorizing carbon materials from combustion and pyrolysis through molecular modeling to predict material properties. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemical and Process Engineering at LRGP - Université de Lorraine, France, where she developed the Tabulated Model of Transition States (TMTS) for gas-phase combustion/pyrolysis kinetics of branched alkanes, and automated and extended it to key reaction families. She also explored pressure dependence of alkyl radical recombination kinetics in collaboration with Argonne National Laboratory. As a postdoctoral researcher at LRGP, she developed methods for rate constant calculations in liquid/supercritical fluids and studied polyaromatic hydrocarbon oxidation with Stanford University.

Fabian P. Hagen
Fabian P. Hagen received his M.Sc. in Chemical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich in 2017. Following a research stay at the University of California, San Diego, he completed his doctorate at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2023 with the distinction summa cum laude for his award-winning thesis on the structure of soot nanoparticles. Since then, he has led and contributed to research activities at the Engler-Bunte-Institute, KIT, on chemically reacting flows of carbon-neutral and carbon-free energy carriers, combining experiments in tailored reactors with advanced diagnostics to generate high-quality datasets for model development and validation.

Yuxuan Ma
Yuxuan Ma is a JSPS PD Fellow at the University of Tokyo. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2023. His research focuses on fire dynamics of solid materials in spaceflight environments, supporting safer crewed space missions. He has published over 30 papers, including work in Progress in Energy and Combustion Science. He serves on the editorial board of Safety Science and Technology, and received the Wu Zhonghua Outstanding Graduate Student Award and outstanding doctoral dissertation awards from USTC, the China Fire Protection Association, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Andrea Nobili
Andrea Nobili is a Postdoctoral Researcher of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. He earned his Ph.D. in Industrial Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, with research experience at CNRS of Orleans. His research focuses on soot chemistry, carbon nanomaterial and hydrogen co-synthesis, propulsion and sustainable transportation fuels, using kinetic modeling, quantum chemistry, and data-driven approaches.

Zhiyong Wu
Dr. Zhiyong Wu is a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Combustion Physics at Lund University, Sweden, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2025 with research focused on metal fuel combustion and advanced laser-based diagnostics. His current research interests include flame spectroscopy, laser diagnostics, solid fuel combustion, nanoparticle formation, and gas-phase chemical kinetics. Dr. Wu is a recipient of the International Postdoctoral Grant from the Swedish Research Council and the Lund University Agenda 2030 Award (Honorable Mention). He has authored 35 peer-reviewed journal papers with over 750 citations and an H-index of 15 according to WOS.

Please join The Combustion Institute in congratulating the Bernard Lewis Fellowship recipients, and the other 2026 award winners honored at the 41st International Symposium on Combustion.

Questions regarding awards may be directed to: office@combustioninstitute.org.