Research and technology brings innovation to chemical engineering. From growing new cartilage cells to help osteoarthritus, to improving drug delivery for cancer patients, chemical engineering offers new solutions to some of our greatest societal challenges.
Spotlight Stories
NSF CAREER Award to Fight Cancer
Sidi Bencherif, assistant professor of chemical engineering, recently received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to develop biomaterials that generate oxygen. These materials could help researchers understand how low oxygen environments affect the immune system and potentially be used to supply oxygen to help train immune cells to fight cancer.
NSF CAREER Award to Address Cardiovascular Disease
Eno Ebong, assistant professor of chemical engineering, recently received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She and her team are studying endothelial cells that line blood vessels to better understand how the blood flow environment and stiffness of the underlying tissue contribute to cardiovascular disease risk.
Engineering in Action
World-Renowned Cooperative Education
Bradley Priem, BS, chemical engineering, had two co-ops that gave him the ability to delve into a particular industry. At Synlogic he was a bioanalytical chemist and bacterial engineer creating e-coli strains, and at bluebird bio he was an upstream process development engineer for gene production. He now knows he wants to go into the biotech industry and is interested in graduate school too.
Global Research Co-op
Taylor Wilde, BS chemical engineering student, worked in a research lab at École Normale Supérieure, a university in Paris. Wilde collaborated with a postdoctoral researcher to create nanomaterials using a chemical vapor deposition, or CVD, furnace. It helped him land his third co-op at GVD Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where worked again with a CVD furnace. Ultimately, Wilde wants to work in renewable energy and contribute to the efforts across the globe to lower society’s carbon footprint.
Recent News
Treating Antibiotic-Resistant Infections
ChE Professor Thomas Webster and his colleagues are using bacteria to develop nanoparticles that will combat antibiotic-resistant infections.
ChE PhD students Bahram Saleh & Caterina Bartomeu Garcia are Finalists for Graduate Student Competition in Microbiointerface Research
Chemical Engineering PhD students Bahram Saleh and Caterina Bartomeu Garcia, from Professor Thomas Webster’s nanomedicine lab, have been called finalists for the upcoming AIChE 2019 annual meeting podium graduate student award competition in Microbiointerface Research. The students will be judged for the quality of the presentations and research on microbial interaction with biomedical interfaces.
Bencherif’s Research Featured on Cover of Advanced Healthcare Materials
ChE Assistant Professor Sidi A. Bencherif’s research is featured on the front cover page of the September issue of Advanced Healthcare Materials.
West to Work on Collaborative NSF Grant to Further Develop Cantera Open-Source Modeling Software
ChE Associate Professor Richard West is part of a $2.5M NSF collaborative effort to further develop and support the successful and popular open-source modeling software Cantera, a suite of tools for problems involving chemical kinetics, thermodynamics, and transport processes.