Kandis Leslie Gilliard-AbdulAziz will join the USC Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as a Gabilan Assistant Professor in January 2024. She currently leads the Sustainable Catalysis and Materials laboratory (the-sustainable-lab.com) at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Chemical and Environmental Engineering. Abdul-Aziz received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining UC Riverside, she was a Provost postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also worked previously as a Forensic scientist for the Philadelphia police department and as a Refinery chemist at Sunoco Chemicals in Philadelphia after receiving a B.S. in Chemistry from Temple University. Her research group develops sustainable catalytic processes using an interdisciplinary toolset from chemistry, materials and chemical engineering. Abdul-Aziz is a 2021 Scialog Negative Emissions Science and National Academy Frontiers of Engineering fellow. She was recently awarded a 2022 NSF Career Award for developing specialized catalysts for CO₂ capture and utilization.