A Third Award of Excellence for Dr Raj Shah

Koehler Instrument Company (USA) is proud to announce that Dr. Raj Shah, a key employee for over 20 years who currently holds the position of Director at the company, was conferred with a ASTM Award of Excellence for the third time last month.

ASTM International, formerly known as the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), is a globally recognised specialist in the development and delivery of international voluntary consensus standards. Today, some 12,000 ASTM standards are used around the world to improve product quality, enhance safety, facilitate market access and trade, and build consumer confidence. Despite having over 32000 members, ASTM has never conferred an award of Excellence to the same individual three times in the last several decades. This is truly an unprecedented and rare honour.

Dr. Shah's previous award of excellence is 2012 was from the Oxidation committee for this work over the years in helping innovate and develop new test standards related to oxidation characteristics of petroleum products. His latest award of excellence is from the Environmental considerate Lubricants committee and was presented by ASTM chairman Mr. Randy Jennings to Dr. Shah in Indianapolis at the latest ASTM meeting. Committee D02 on Petroleum Products, Liquid Fuels and Lubricants, the group that awarded Dr. Shah, has been active for over sixty years. Its scope is the promotion of knowledge and the promulgation of standard specifications, classifications, test methods, practices, guides, and terminology for all petroleum products.

Petro Industry News decided to speak to Raj about his unique achievement and this is what he had to say; “ I am truly humbled and honoured to receive this award for the third time. There are numerous individuals from all over our industry who are very deserving of this award and they have all been very helpful to me for all these years and I really thank them for this honour. This award of excellence belongs to all of them and I could not have done any of this without their help. Being in the analytical instrumentation world, it gives me the unique opportunity to work in various ASTM committees involved with  fuels, lubes and greases as we manufacture instrumentation for all of these markets. Most folks specialise in one of these areas but I have been very fortunate to be able to work with experts in each of these committees and I owe all of them a debt of gratitude. I thank ASTM again for this wonderful honour and will cherish it for years to come ”.

Dr. Raj Shah also reflected on his last twenty years at Koehler Instrument company, a US based manufacturer of a wide range of petroleum and petrochemical laboratory testing instrumentation. He said; “There have been numerous advances in lab testing over the last two decades and I have been proud to be part of Koehler during that time. While our industry has not moved forward anywhere close to the pace at which information technology has changed in the last few decades, there have been numerous significant improvements in petroleum testing instrumentation and most of the instrumentation companies like us at Koehler have led the charge to making these advances. These changes have significantly helped end users and lab personnel worldwide in saving time and money and I have been very fortunate to work for a manufacturer like Koehler where we put a premium on research and development and do all we can to help our customers perform their laboratory tests more efficiently and accurately. Societies like ASTM and the Energy Institute have been the backbone on which we all rely and count upon in this environment where changes sometimes occur at a pace never before seen in the petroleum testing business, and I for one am extremely grateful to be working with wonderfully qualified folks who volunteer their time and effort at these organisations."

Dr. Shah has also been an ardent supporter of Petro Industry News and is renowned in the field for his ability to take real life field lubrication problems and simulate them in the laboratory, thus developing unique bench scale test procedures to evaluate Fuels, Lubricants and Greases. An active volunteer, he also currently serves on the industrial advisory board, of several departments of Engineering, including Penn State University, SUNY (Stony Brook), Hofstra University and the Tribology and Lubrication Science program at Auburn University. Koehler wishes to sincerely to congratulate Raj on this marvelous and unique achievement.