ECOAT24 Brewer Award Winners

The 2024 Brewer Award Winners were presented with their awards at ECOAT24 at the Omni ChampionsGate in Orlando, Florida on April 4. This year’s winners are Karen McGlothlin, The Electrocoat Association, who won for Market Promotion of Electrocoat Technology; Suresh Patel, BASF/Chemetall, who won for Application of Electrocoat Technology; and Robin Peffer, PPG, who won for Development of Electrocoat Technology. 

Karen McGlothlin has done more to promote the benefits and technology of electrodeposition coatings in North American than anyone in the 21^st century. As the long-time executive director of The Electrocoat Association, McGlothlin has worked to extend the knowledge of ecoat to all regions of North America by maintaining through her leadership the participation of an evolving roster of directors, committee members, writers and presenters; by thoroughly understanding the geographic concentrations of the ecoat market in the U.S., and the logistics behind delivering the greatest knowledge-sharing benefits in the selection of association events and settings; and by successfully stewarding the financial resources and stability of The Electrocoat Association. 

Suresh Patel has been influencing and educating users of substrate cleaning and pretreat products for ecoat lines for decades. Throughout his distinguished career with BASF/Chemetall, he has been perceived as a leader and subject matter expert by his peers and customers. Over that time, he has volunteered countless hours to promote and educate on the aesthetic, economic and environmental benefits of the technology of ecoat over clean and properly pretreated metal. With his hard work, teaching skills and deep knowledge of chemistry and application techniques, Patel has greatly advanced the awareness, and the level of quality of ecoat throughout the manufacturing and finishing industry.

Robin Peffer has been working in and around electrocoat technology for her entire career of almost 30 years with PPG. She began working on the research formulation team where her efforts directly contributed to the ongoing success of one-coat, white, cationic acrylic products for the appliance industry, representing some of the highest throughput tanks anywhere in the global, industrial ecoat marketplace. She also invested considerable research effort into flexible, two-coat electrocoat technology as well as products tailored for bulk application onto unracked parts.

Under her guidance, PPG has grown the business to support 12 pilot- or commercial-scale Aerocron systems worldwide, with new interest in this market growing weekly. The most significant of these systems was installed at Air Tractor in 2017.

Peffer is an inventor or co-inventor on 40 published U.S. patents (and counting), 32 of which involve electrocoat technology. Peffer’s technical and market leadership has led ecoat from the Automotive and Industrial markets into the adjacent Aerospace market. Formerly, electrocoat had only tangentially penetrated aerospace using individually approved parts (ecoat inclusive in the part approval) electrocoated by industrial applicators, with unrecognized products, in limited circumstances. Now, the technology continues to grow into its own within aerospace OEM and even MRO organizations, and great things are expected for the near future.

Dr. George E.F. Brewer is generally credited with the original idea of electrodeposition of paint through his work and research during the late 1950s at Ford Motor Co. By loaning his name to this prestigious award given during the ECOAT Conference, recipients stand out among the best in the field of electrocoating.