The catalytic processes that facilitate the production of many chemicals and fuels could become much more environmentally friendly thanks to a breakthrough achieved by researchers from Lehigh and Rice Universities published in Nature Chemistry. Click here for the college article.

Advances in oil refining, drug and chemical production and environmental protection, says Israel E. Wachs, depend on understanding the relationship between a material’s molecular structures and its catalytic properties. Click here to read the college article.

A DuPont-Lehigh team, using tailored sequences of DNA, reports breakthrough in the campaign to sort and separate CNTs. Click here to read the college article highlighting Professor Anand Jagota's research.

Professor Jeetain Mittal's work is highlighted in this college article.

The world has spent billions to develop ethanol fuel additives, says Professor Mark Snyder, but relatively little to make hydrocarbon fuels directly from biomass, which could potentially provide nearly half of America’s energy. Click here to read the college article.

Researchers sharpen their competitive edge in an annual undergraduate symposium. Click here for the college article highlighting chemical engineering students among various undergraduate researchers.

Researchers from Lehigh (Professor Mayuresh Kothare) and Johns Hopkins are measuring the effect of sensory feedback on the transmission of brain signals. Their goal is to help people with brain damage regain lost function. Click here for the college article.

Please join the Department of Chemical Engineering in welcoming Dr. Jeetain Mittal to the faculty. Dr. Mittal comes from a postdoctoral appointment at NIH. He received his Ph.D. at University of Texas in 2007. His research interests are tied to simulation and theory of thermodynamics, with a focus on nanoscale transport and protein stability and dynamics. Click here for more information about Dr. Mittal.

See college article.

A new DNA-based method, published in the journal Nature by Xiaomin Tu and Ming Zheng of DuPont and co-authors Suresh Manohar and Professor Anand Jagota, can sort and separate specific types of carbon nanotubes from a mixture.

Professor Israel Wachs' 2005 article "Recent conceptual advances in the catalysis science of mixed metal oxide catalytic materials" is honored as one of the "Top Cited Authors 2004-2008". The Catalysis journals from Elsevier are widely accessible by institutes worldwide. Over 5250 institutes enjoy access to the Catalysis journals via ScienceDirect, and over 4.7 million full-text articles were downloaded from the journals during the last 12 months. His accomplishment will be acknowledged at the 21st North American Catalysis Society Meeting in San Francisco on June 8th, 2009.

Kenneth Ford (Ph.D. 2008) with Professors James Gilchrist and Hugo Caram were chosen for their presentation at the AIChE Annual Meeting entitled "Density Measurements in a Vibro-Fluidized Deep Granular Bed" in Area 3C - Solids Flow, Handling, & Processing. The award will be presented at the Particle Technology Forum Dinner at the 2009 AIChE Annual Meeting.

Photo credit: Pisist Kumnorkaew

College article

Zinc auditions for a role in solar energy storage

Professors James Gilchrist and Nelson Tansu (ECE) will be coating OLEDs with microlens arrays developed in Gilchrist's laboratory.

Kevin F. Doura, Chemical Engineering graduate student advised by Professor Israel Wachs, placed second in the 2009 Spring Symposium of the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York.

At a time when society is using energy at an ever-increasing rate, scientists and engineers are searching for new and better resources for the future. Lehigh’s student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers is hosting an Energy Issues Symposium on Thursday, March 26 at 6:00 pm. The event, which will take place in Packard Auditorium, will focus on a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the challenges and opportunities presented in new energy resources. Click here for more information.

Chris Keturakis ’09 placed second in the undergraduate poster competition at a national ChemE convention. Visit here for the college article on Chris' achievements.

There were ten posters on nano topics submitted by graduate students to be judged by the attendees for possible prizes. One student was from Penn State University, and the other nine were from Lehigh University. While all the posters were really outstanding, the attendees did pick the winners after looking at the posters and interviewing the students. That process took some two hours of attendees crowding around the posters, reading and popping questions like crazy. The winners were as follows:

Suresh Manohar was awarded the Alan Gent award based on his work on measuring the forces to peel DNA from graphite. This research is inspired by previous work on DNA-CNT (carbon nanotube) complexes. This is an award for the best graduate student paper/presentation at the Adhesion Society meeting. His work was jointly supervised by Professors Dmitri Vezenov (Chemistry) and Anand Jagota. Others who contributed were Amber Mantz and Kevin Bancroft (Chemistry) and C-Y. Hui of Cornell University.

Dr. John C. Chen, former dean and now professor emeritus of chemical engineering, will give a talk on “The World’s Energy and Environmental Challenges” at the weekly seminar of the department of mechanical engineering and mechanics on Friday, January 23, at 3:45 p.m. in 466 Packard Laboratory. Read More

Annual AIChE meeting highlights Lehigh chemical engineers. See college article here.

Research by Professor James F. Gilchrist and Pisist Kumnorkaew, in collaboration with colleagues Yi Khoon Ee and Professor Nelson Tansu in ECE, investigating rapid convective deposition for fabrication of microlens arrays is featured on the cover of Langmuir.

The radio station spoke to two Lehigh faculty members about clean coal technology. Click here for the WHYY-FM webcast of his segment.

The "Excellence in Polymer Science and Engineering Award", sponsored by the Lehigh Valley Society for Plastics Engineering, was won by Megan Casey and Yi-Ling (Ivan) Liang. Megan is a student working within the Emulsion Polymers Institute and Ivan is associated with the Center for Polymer Science and Engineering. Both students will present their work at the annual SPE meeting. See the college article here.

Researchers are paying heed because geckoes and other lizards and insects can run up, down or sideways on nearly any surface, wall or ceiling, without falling off. Their remarkable ability has inspired studies of new forms of adhesives. See the college article on Professor Anand Jagota's research.

Energy research spans the gamut at Lehigh and is closely tied to environmental impact. Engineers harvest methane hydrates and chart fusion plasma flows. They work towards a hydrogen economy and solve complex power-plant challenges. Their goal: cleaner, smarter energy generation and end use now, and renewable sources for the future. See Professors Caram, Sircar, and Wachs highlighed in this college article.

A Lehigh invention that removes arsenic from groundwater is being used on four continents. See the college article highlighting Professor Sengupta's research on adsorbents.

Dr. Rakesh Jain of Harvard Medical School discusses cutting-edge cancer research as part of the Schiesser Lecture Series.

A large contingent of faculty researchers and graduate students will represent Lehigh in this year’s American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) annual meeting, set for mid-November in Philadelphia. Read the RCEAS article here.

Professor Mayuresh Kothare, with collaborator Professor Nitish Thakor of Johns Hopkins University, will develop optimal predictive feedback for brain-machine interfaces in order to restore impaired motor tasks in disabled subjects. In the highly competitive new NSF program of Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation (CDI), developed "to create revolutionary science and engineering research outcomes made possible by innovations and advances in computational thinking", only 200 of 1270 preproposals were advanced to the next round, and only roughly 30 of these 200 full proposals were awarded, a 2.4% acceptance rate.

The Chemical Engineering Program has been re-accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the nation's premier engineering evaluation organization. Since 1932, ABET has provided quality assurance of education through accreditation. ABET accredits more than 2800 engineering, engineering technology, computing, and applied science programs at over 600 colleges and universities nationally. The Chemical Engineering Program at Lehigh University, granting degrees since 1907, has been accredited continuously since its first request for accreditation in 1936.

Professor Mayuresh Kothare will attend the National Acadamy of Engineering 2008 Frontiers of Engineering meeting in September. This three-day meeting is organized of the nation's outstanding young engineers to "discuss pioneering technical and leading-edge research in various engineering fields and industry sectors".

Read the college article here for more information on Professor Kothare's recent achievements.

Please join the Department of Chemical Engineering in welcoming Dr. Mark Snyder to the faculty. Dr. Snyder comes from the University of Minnesota, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. He performed his Ph.D. at University of Delaware and is an alumnus of Lehigh University, receiving his B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2000. His research interests are tied to energy, with a focus on biorefinery challenges and design of nanomaterials for efficient reaction and separation technologies. Click here for more information about Dr. Snyder.

Professor James F. Gilchrist, with colleagues Professor Nelson Tansu of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor Xuanhong Cheng of Materials Science and Engineering, will investigate the fundamental process of self-assembly of monolayers of microspheres. This grant from the National Science Foundation reinforces existing collaborations that enable novel applications of the surface structures. These monlayers are used as microlens arrays that significantly enhance the performance of LEDs developed in the Tansu group. Studies of this process have been published in Applied Physics Letters and Langmuir. In collaboration with Prof. Cheng, these monolayers will be used to enhance capture/release of CD4+ lymphocytes for the whole blood detection of HIV/AIDS.

Constantine Khripin, advised by Professor Anand Jagota, was honored with the Elizabeth V. Stout Dissertation award. Four students, one from each college, are chosen for this award and will receive a plaque and a honorarium.

Two Lehigh engineers have received a U.S. patent for an invention that uses a hybrid polymeric and inorganic material to remove arsenic, a highly toxic and carcinogenic element, from groundwater. Read more.

Phil Bresnahan’s college sport, his current student research, and his future field of study all revolve around water. Continue reading more here.

Visit here to view the National Science Foundation highlight of Prof. Israel Wachs' research.

Lehigh students are participating in the Tiger-Hen-Hawk Rheology Symposium featuring presentations by graduate researchers from Princeton University (Tigers), University of Delaware (Hens), and Lehigh University.

The 33rd Annual David M. Mason Lecturers in Chemical Engineering at Stanford University will be presented by Lehigh President Alice P. Gast. She will give two presentations April 28th-30th, 2008, the first entitled "Why Complex Fluids Are So Simple and Interesting" focusing on her research experiences, and the second "The American Research University in a Flat World". The lectures are named in honor of the late David M. Mason, who was Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at Stanford University.

The 39th Annual Short Course of the Emulsion Polymers Institute will take place from June 2nd to June 6th. This year's course is entitled Advances in Emulsion Polymerization and Latex Technology.

More information can be found at the EPI webpage, https://fp1.cc.lehigh.edu/inemuls/epi/Lehigh_sc.htm

Megan B. Casey, Jinmo Hong and Lisa M. Spagnola received awards last month.

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On Sunday March 30, Arup Sengupta - Professor of Chemical Engineering and Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering - appeared on the Eco Radio Network (www.ecoradionetwork.com) to discuss his work on water remediation in Bangladesh and eastern India.

The Eco Radio Network is a weekly radio program that covers broad topics concerning recycling, sustainability, conservation, alternative energy, up-to-date news of recycling events and other environmental issues. It can be heard on 810 WGY Sunday evenings from 6pm-8pm (click here to listen live).

You can listen to Prof. Sengupta's interview here:

Anthony McHugh, the Ruth H. and Sam Madrid Professor and department chair of chemical engineering, has made significant progress in solving both issues by encapsulating drugs in a honeycomb-like polymer matrix, thus helping attain controlled drug release while providing maximum DL to the delivery system. Continue reading here.

He was cited for contributions over the past 30 years to the field of catalysis.

Israel Wachs, the G. Whitney Snyder Professor of chemical engineering and a world-renowned expert in catalysis, has been chosen by the American Chemical Society to receive the George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry.

The award will be presented by ACS’s Division of Petroleum Chemistry at the society’s Spring 2008 national meeting in New Orleans.

Wachs is the second consecutive member of the Lehigh faculty to win the Olah Award. Bruce Koel, professor of chemistry and vice provost for research, won the award in 2007. George Olah is the 1994 Nobel laureate in chemistry.

Wachs was cited for contributions over the past 30 years to the field of catalysis, which is the study of the process in which a chemical agent is employed to bring about or accelerate a chemical reaction.

Undergraduate chemical engineering student Emily Szabo ’08 has been selected by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) as a recipient of its Donald F. and Mildred Topp Othmer National Scholarship Award for 07-08. Emily was nominated by Professor Mayuresh Kothare of Chemical Engineering. Emily is the current president of Lehigh’s AIChE student chapter, a member of the Society of Women Engineers, and part of the Integrated Business and Engineering honors program.

Throughout his graduate-student career at Lehigh, Leonidas Bleris maintained a dual focus that is becoming increasingly common in the world of engineering.

While designing mathematical models and control algorithms for micro- and nano-scale chemical reactors, Bleris kept one foot in the department of chemical engineering and one in the department of electrical and computer engineering

He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 2006 under the supervision of Mayuresh Kothare, the R.L. McCann Associate Professor of chemical engineering, and received several impressive awards in the process.

Professor Mayuresh Kothare, the R.L. McCann Associate Professor of chemical engineering, has been chosen to receive the 2007 Outstanding Young Researcher Award of the CAST (Computing and Systems Technology) Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

SenGupta's filtration system, which removes arsenic from water at the wellhead, has been installed in more than 150 villages in Eastern India since 1997. Continue reading here.

Laurenzi, assistant professor of chemical engineering, and his students are the first researchers to simulate the performance of microarrays. They have developed algorithms that can characterize the cross-hybridization occurring in any microarray design. Continue reading here.

Israel Wachs, professor of chemical engineering, made this discovery while anchoring nanoparticle catalysts of titania on a silica substrate. He developed a "multilevel substrate," with the titania serving as a nanoscaffold able to anchor metal-oxide catalytically active sites and control their reactivity. Continue reading here.

Gilchrist studies the flow behavior of small particles that range in size from nanoparticles to grains of sand. He has fabricated channels as fine as a human hair and added ridges that enhance mixing by stirring the fluid as it passes through the channel. The use of such small systems allows him to measure the mixing and segregation of small particles more accurately and will have direct impact on the design of microscale "lab-on-a-chip" systems used as chemical and biological sensors. Continue reading here.

Interfacial fluid mechanics had its genesis when Chaudhury discovered that droplets can be made to migrate on surfaces. Continue reading here.

Lehigh this year received two NIRT grants and two one-year awards through NSF's Nanoscale Exploratory Research (NER) program. Continue reading here.

Lehigh, in collaboration with DuPont and MIT, recently received a four-year, $1.25-million grant from NSF to solve these problems by developing new ways of manipulating CNTs in solution. Continue reading here.

Lehigh President Alice P. Gast - a nationally-recognized leader in Chemical Engineering - will be officially inaugurated as the university’s 13th president on Friday, April 13, during a formal afternoon ceremony at Stabler Arena and Convocation Center.

Events commemorating the inauguration will span three days, including an academic research symposium on Thursday, April 12, and a Family Day of Service on Saturday, April 14. For detailed information on all of the inauguration events, visit the inauguration Web site.

The program and downloadable registration forms for the 38th Annual Short Course: "Advances in Emulsion Polymerization and Latex Technology" are now available via the Emulsion Polymers Institute. The course will be held at Lehigh University from June 4 to June 8, 2007. Registration for the course is now open.

An international team of engineers, led by Lehigh professor Arup SenGupta, has won a $200,000 prize for its efforts to counter what some people have called the world’s worst environmental catastrophe.

The researchers, who have designed a system that filters arsenic from well water, will receive the Silver Award in a contest sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and The Grainger Foundation.

Click here for more.

Mohamed S. El-Aasser, Lehigh University provost, vice president for academic affairs, and professor of Chemical Engineering, was elected a Fellow of the American Chemical Society’s Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (PMSE). The award is the second top honor that El-Aasser has received in five years from PMSE. In 2002, he was chosen to receive the division’s Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings

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Manoj Chaudhury, a respected and popular teacher whose research into adhesion has been praised for its simplicity and ingenuity, has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Chaudhury, the Franklin J. Howes Jr. Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and former director of the Polymer Interfaces Center, was cited for “conducting fundamental studies on the roles of energetic and kinetic processes on adhesion, fracture and tribological properties of polymeric interfaces.”

APS has more than 45,000 members, including about 10,000 from other countries. About 200 members are elected Fellows each year, mostly for distinction in research. Chaudhury’s election, in early November, was recommended by APS’s division of polymer physics.

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Anthony McHugh, chair of the chemical engineering department, has been named a co-recipient of the 2006 Alan Glanville Award of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. The award is given annually for a paper published by the Institute that is of particular merit in the field of polymers.

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