The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is proud to announce that Professor Mattheos Koffas has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) — one of the highest honors the Institute bestows, reserved for members who have made outstanding, sustained contributions to the chemical engineering profession.
The graduation banquet for the CBE Class of 2026 and graduate students was held on Wednesday, May 13, 2026. Families, faculty, and staff gathered to celebrate perseverance, growth, and the promise of new beginnings for our recent graduates.
At the banquet, the following prize winners were announced:
CBE continues to innovate the process design curriculum. At most universities, process design students are given a specific process with well-defined feedstock and product specifications. About 20 years ago, the faculty decided to take a different approach where each 4-person team proposes a process, slate of products, identifies the market, and chooses a plant location based on their strategy for engineering practice. Project phases include (i) technical scoping and assessment, (ii) preliminary design, (iii) preliminary economics, and (iv) final feasibility.
Thi Nguyen, a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has been awarded a one-year graduate fellowship from the RPI Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).
A team led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) professors Prashun Gorai (PI) and Patrick Underhill (co-PI) has been awarded a grant from the Future of Computing Research Collaboration (FCRC). The FCRC is a joint partnership between RPI and IBM Corporation to advance research in Artificial Intelligence, Semiconductors, and Quantum Computing.
