Chemical Engineering

Eric Young, the Leonard P. Kinnicutt Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, will instruct a Synthetic Biology course at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory from July 26 - August 8, 2023. The course will focus on how the complexity of biological systems can be combined with traditional engineering approaches to result in new design principles for synthetic biology. 

Christina Bailey-Hytholt, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, was named to the 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 list. She was recognized for her ground-breaking research on the placenta, an organ that has historically received little scientific attention compared to its importance for everyone living today. Congratulations!!!

Andrew Teixeira, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, was awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER grant for his project entitled "Nitrogen Activation: Splitting Kinetic Cycles and Breaking Energetic Barriers with Pulsed Catalysis." The five year award will develop a new catalytic strategy for overcoming thermodynamic and kinetic barriers by dynamically operating a catalytic cycle at various temperatures and thermodynamic environments.

Eric Young, the Leonard P. Kinnicutt Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, was awarded a prestigious NSF CAREER grant for his project "A Red Yeast Cell Factory." The five year award will enable the bioengineering of basidiomycetes, a group of fungi essential to many important biological processes yet lacking tools available for other yeast.

Associate Professor Mike Timko's collaborative work with researchers at MIT was recently published in Nature Communications. The paper, titled "Engineered microbial biofuel production and recovery under supercritical carbon dioxide," describes organism engineering and separations processes to produce biofuels in supercritical CO2. Congratulations to Professor Timko, his research team, and collaborators on this innovative work!

Researchers in the lab of Professor Hong Susan Zhou are developing a biosensor that doctors and nurses can use to quickly detect Clostridium difficile, a dangerous and sometimes fatal gastrointestinal infection. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Professor Deskins, in collaboration with WPI Mechanical Engineering Professor Pratap Rao, received funding to train clean energy innovators.

Professors Deskins and Rao also were awarded NSF funding to increase the efficiency of catalysts for the production and utilization of carbon-free or carbon-neutral fuels via electrical-to-chemical and solar-to-chemical processes. Professor Deskins, in collaboration with Professor Xiaowei Teng at the University of New Hampshire, is also funded to develop efficient, cleaner methods to produce hydrogen, a valuable fuel and chemical feedstock.

Department of Chemical Engineering Professor Sue Roberts, Department Head, was highlighted in the Worcester Telegram! The new genetic engineering technique developed by her research group could improve plant cell based production of the important anticancer drug paclitaxel (Taxol).