News from Chemical Engineering
Changing Curriculum and Addressing Graduate Issues
ARUP
CHAKRABORTY, CHAIR, CHEMICAL ENGINEERING
“ ...I believe that our efforts to recruit the best graduate students
in the nation are successful only because of the strong participation
of our current students in organizing prospective student visits."
News from Chemical Engineering
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College and Campus News
Endowed Chairs and Distinguished Professorships: the stories behind the six new endowments
The fall semester started with the usual excitement associated with the beginning of a new academic year. We are very pleased to have 30 new graduate students join the department. This past year, 50 percent of the students admitted to the program accepted our offer. This is the highest acceptance rate in at least the last decade and speaks to the high quality of the research opportunities in the department. Prof. Balsara, Prof. Maboudian, and Ms. Aileen Harris led our graduate student recruitment effort, and they deserve kudos.
However, I believe that our efforts to recruit the best graduate students in the nation are successful only because of the strong participation of our current students in organizing prospective student visits. They play an invaluable role in conveying a sense of excitement about their work and encouraging prospective students to join our program.
Evolving
curriculum
We are continuing efforts that were started last year to evolve our undergraduate
curriculum so that our graduates continue to be attractive to a wide spectrum
of corporate sectors. The core subjects that define our discipline are
transport phenomena, thermodynamics, kinetics, and design. The Berkeley
faculty has started a collaborative effort to create examples for courses
in thecore subjects that will help illustrate the basic principles in
application areas that include petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, microelectronics,
biomedicine, polymeric materials, and electrochemistry. If we are successful
in this effort, the resulting web-based instruction materials will be
a resource not only for our students and faculty but also for the entire
discipline. Other new features of our curriculum include the addition
of a required course in biology, and integration of separation processes
in our courses on thermodynamics, transport phenomena, unit operations,
and design. Vice Chair David Graves, along with Dr. Wallman
and Prof. Reimer, did much of the careful thinking about the strengths
and weaknesses of the curriculum. David is currently on sabbatical in
Paris, and Prof. Clay Radke is kindly filling in for him as vice
chair.
This
fall we started an effort to increase interactions outside the classroom
between undergraduates and the faculty. Each faculty advisor has lunch
several times a year with small groups of undergraduate advisees. We hope
that these lunch meetings will provide greater opportunities for career
counseling. The department is very grateful to ChevronTexaco for providing
financial support for this program.
Product
development course being studied
In my column last year, I mentioned that we were beginning to consider
the possibility of adding a component to our graduate program that provides
opportunities to learn how products are developed in corporate laboratories.
We assembled an advisory board of corporate leaders to help us create
such a program. The advisory board is extremely supportive of the idea,
and we are moving forward with plans to add this new dimension to the
Ph.D. program. I will keep you updated as our plans develop. We would
benefit greatly from any input you may have in this regard, so please
write to us with your
thoughts.
Welcome to our newest
faculty member
Our search for a junior faculty member last year
was successful. We are delighted that Dr. Rachel Segalman has accepted
our offer to join the faculty. Rachel works on hybrid semi-conductor/polymeric
materials. Her addition to the faculty makes our department stronger both
in the soft materials area as well as in electronic materials. Rachel
was wooed by many universities this year and we are very fortunate to
have attracted her to join our faculty. She is currently en route to France
to start postdoctoral work after completing her doctoral degree at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and will join the faculty in
January of 2004.
Faculty
Honors and Awards
Our
current faculty members continue to garner distinctions for teaching and
research. Congratulations to Clay Radke for winning the ACS award
in Colloid Chemistry; Henrik Wallman for winning the College Distinguished
Teaching award; David Schaffer for being chosen as one of the Top
100 Young Innovators by Technology Review and receiving the Chemical Engineering
Excellence Award for Academic Teaching from the Northern California AIChE;
Elton Cairns, who presented an invited lecture at the International
Society of Electrochemistry Meeting in Dusseldorf in September; John
Newman for being appointed to the Lars Onsager Professorship for 2002
at the Norwegian University of Science & Technology in Trondheim,
Norway; Alexis Bell for being the 2002 William G. Lowrie Lecturer
at the Ohio State University; John Prausnitz for winning the Rossini
Award of the Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC); and Enrique
Iglesia for delivering the keynote lecture for the Symposium on Natural
Gas Conversion held during the 2002 spring meeting of the American Chemical
Society.
Please write to us or stop by if you are in
the area. We would love to know about your careers and lives as well as
hear your thoughts on how the department can continue to lead the discipline
in teaching and research.
© 2002 UC Regents
College
of Chemistry UC
Berkeley