Fall 2012

Welcome to CBE@Rensselaer.  2012 has been a wonderful year for Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer. We have much to report.  Here are some recent successes:

• The Department’s US News & World Report graduate program ranking improved to 21 from 27 last year! This is the biggest jump in the nation. Over the last four years we have moved rapidly from 33 to 21.
• Dr. Vidhya Chakrapani will join us in Jan 2013 as a new assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering. Her research focuses on energy (solar energy conversion, semiconductor photochemistry), and will add significant new strength to department’s research portfolio.
• CBE continues to grow. We have two tenure-track openings in the department. See the ad here. In addition, CBE will also play a major role in recruiting faculty for the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (TERM) Constellation in which there are up to four endowed professorships available as of Sept 2012.
• This fall, we welcomed the largest PhD class in the history of the department – 27 students! These students come from all over the US (MIT, Wisconsin, Penn, U Va., Clarkson, etc.) and the world, and include our first NSF graduate fellow.
• Our faculty continue to do outstanding research and win major awards: Steve Cramer was elected ACS fellow recently; Pete Tessier delivered the prestigious Alan P. Colburn Lecture at University of Delaware; Georges Belfort was elected to the Advisory Board of Max Plank Institute and member of Institute of Bologna Academy of Sciences (Italy) (both firsts for Rensselaer); and all four of our assistant professors won multiple research grants over the past year.

The department is an intellectually vibrant place. Check out our 2012 Fall Seminar Series. Prof. K. Dane Wittrup (MIT) was this year’s Michael M. Abbott Lecturer in Spring and presented two intellectually stimulating seminars.  And Prof. Kristala Jones Prather (MIT) is the 2012 Hendrick C. Van Ness Award Winner. This fall we also continue the Graduate Student Seminar Series, where third and fourth year students will present their research to the entire department.

Our graduate and undergraduate students continue to excel. Ali Reza Ladiwala from Pete Tessier group won the 2012 Karen and Lester Gerhardt Best Thesis Prize from Rensselaer, and Melissa Holstein (Steve Cramer group) won the prestigious AIChE 2012 Separations Division Graduate Student Research Award.

Our undergraduate enrollments have doubled over the last five years with the total students in CBE reaching ~300. In addition to excelling in the toughest discipline on the campus, our UG students somehow find time to do quality research, present their work at local and national conferences, maintain a lively chapter of AIChE in the department, participate actively in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), organize a graduate symposium, and much more! The Society of Biological Engineers is also taking roots at Rensselaer, guided enthusiastically by Prof. Georges Belfort.

If you have not been to Rensselaer recently, I invite you to visit us. The campus has continued to improve at a rapid pace. With impressive new buildings, new and creative projects, new faculty, and strong student body, there is certainly excitement in the air.

Shekhar Garde
Elaine S. and Jack S. Parker Professor and Department Head