(ATLANTA) March 14, 2024 – TAPPI is pleased to announce that Seyhan Nuyan, Ph.D., TAPPI Fellow, has been named winner of the prestigious Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award.
Dr. Nuyan, formerly the director, Sales and Applications with Valmet, is retired.
Dr. Nuyan’s primary industrial contributions are in the areas of quality measurements and control solutions for moving sheet processes. He is one of the pioneers of developing advanced paper quality measurement and control solutions and holds four control system patents. A prolific author, Dr. Nuyan published numerous peer-reviewed articles and contributed to various books including co-authoring “Paper Machine Quality Control Systems” Volumes 1 and 2.
Over the course of his 43 year career at Valmet, Dr. Nuyan worked in leadership positions from Applications R&D to Product, Business, Sales, and Executive Management in the US, Canada and Finland. In 2005, at the end of his Valmet residency in Finland, Dr. Nuyan was honored with a presidential Medal of Honor, Knight, First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland.
A TAPPI member since 1987, he served in many leadership roles in the Process Control Division, including secretary, vice chairman, chairman, awards chairman, and steering committee representative. In 2018, he received the Division’s Leadership and Service award and was named Chair Emeritus, Process Control. He was an active member of the Gulf Coast TAPPI and Virginia-Carolina Local Sections, and also served as chairman of PaperCon’s steering committee in 2018. He was a member of the TAPPI TIP 1101-01 Working Group and played an active role in expanding the calculations in the TIP’s 2017 revision.
Dr. Nuyan has presented at many conferences winning the 2008 Jasper Mardon Memorial Prize and the Division’s Best Paper Awards for 2008 and 2018. He is also a PAPTAC member and contributed to its Theory & Practice of Papermaking courses over a 15-year period. He is a Life member of IEEE and Sigma Xi, and currently serves on the Board of Finnish American Chamber of Commerce Southeast.
Dr. Nuyan holds a Ph.D. in Control Engineering and a M.S. in Electronics both from the University of South Carolina, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
The award will be presented at TAPPICon, April 28-May 1, 2024 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA.
About the Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award:
First presented in 1985, the prestigious Gunnar Nicholson Gold Medal Award is TAPPI’s highest technical honor in recognition of an individual’s exceptional industry contributions. It is presented annually only if the individual has made preeminent scientific and engineering achievements of proven commercial benefit to the world’s pulp, paper, board, and forest products industries including forestry, derived products, their process technologies, and their applications.
About TAPPI:
TAPPI is the leading association for the worldwide pulp, paper, packaging, tissue and converting industries and publisher of Paper360°, Tissue360° and TAPPI Journal. Through information exchange, events, trusted content and networking opportunities, TAPPI helps members elevate their performance by providing solutions that lead to better, faster and more cost-effective ways of doing business. It has provided management training and networking to the industry’s leaders for nearly 110 years. For more information, visit TAPPI’s website.
