Sheima J. Khatib is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Virginia Tech. She received her PhD in Chemical Physics in 2007 from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Institute of Catalysis and Petrochemistry (CSIC) (Spain). She continued her research from 2008-2010 as a postdoc in the Institute of Physical Chemistry “Rocasolano” also in Madrid, and then moved to Virginia Tech for a second postdoc position. She then joined the department of chemical engineering at Texas Tech University in 2015, where she worked for seven years, first as assistant and then as associate professor. She finally moved back to Virginia Tech in Fall of 2022. Her expertise is in studying structure-activity relationships, adsorption microcalorimetry and membrane technology applied to heterogeneous catalysis. Her main areas of interest are natural gas conversion, dehydroaromatization, membrane reactors, catalyst stability, determination of deactivation and regeneration pathways. She received the 2019 NSF CAREER Award for a project combining methane dehydroaromatization with membrane technology. Dr. Khatib is also passionate about exploring new engineering education methods in her classes and places much emphasis on teaching, having received multiple teaching awards and honors including the 2022 Jerry S. Rawls Outstanding Undergraduate Educator Award, 2019 Texas Tech Alumni Association Award, 2017 George T. and Gladys Abell-Hanger Faculty Award at Texas Tech University, and the 2017 and 2018 AIChE student chapter awards, also at Texas Tech. In 2022 she was inducted into the Texas Tech Teaching Academy. She has also taken several leadership roles in the chemical engineering and catalysis communities, including as programming chair for the Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division (CRE) of the AIChE (2022,2023), chair of the CRE Diversity and Inclusion Task Force (2022), and scientific chair for the 29th North American Catalysis Society Meeting (NAM29) (2025). She currently serves as an editor for the Chemical Engineering Journal (Elsevier).