MIT Reports to the President 2000–2001

Department of Chemical Engineering

In This Report Undergraduate Education Graduate Education Faculty Notes Research Highlights Departmental Awards

In the academic year 2000-2001, the department maintained its high productivity and visibility. We continued as number one amongst chemical engineering departments in the annual academic survey of the US New and World Report. We graduated 21 doctoral candidates together with 40 M.S. students, totaling 61 advanced degrees. The research dollar-volume of over $19 million was reached to support departmental research activities.

The department's undergraduate enrollment stands at 232 students with approximately 85 students per graduating class and the percentage of women now reaching 56 percent. A $3.4 million renovation to the entire sub-basement of Building 66 is underway in order to create a state-of-the-art undergraduate teaching laboratory ready for student use in the spring term of 2002.

The graduate student enrollment is stable at 206 students with 166 in the doctoral program and 40 master's students, most of whom are in the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice. The class includes 73 foreign, 59 female and 32 minority students, of which 18 are Asian American. This year, we received 372 applications for our graduate program and offered admission to 89 students, with 49 accepting our offer.

Professor Alice P. Gast from Stanford University will join MIT in the fall of 2001 as Vice President for Research and Associate Provost for the Institute and as the Chemical Engineering Department's first holder of the Robert T. Haslam Professorship. This spring, Professor Gast won the election into the National Academy of Engineering for her research at the frontiers of the chemical physics of colloidal and polymer solutions, polymer adsorption and, most recently, proteins.

Professor Kenneth J. Beers joined the department as an Assistant Professor in July 2000 after completing a postdoctoral position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Professor Patrick S. Doyle began his appointment as an Assistant Professor in December 2000 following a postdoctoral appointment at the Institute Curie in Paris.

Professor Jackie Y. Ying was promoted to full Professor. Professor Paul I. Barton was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Both promotions are effective in July 2001.

Professor Karen K. Gleason assumed the role of Executive Officer in the Department as of July 2001, replacing Professor Charles L. Cooney. The department is extremely appreciative of the unprecedented set of building and renovation projects under Professor Cooney's leadership since 1995. Also effective July 2001, Professor Daniel Blankschtein becomes Graduate Officer and Professor Dane K. Wittrup will head Graduate Admissions, filling posts vacated by Professors Robert E. Cohen and Gregory Rutledge, respectively. Professors Cohen and Rutledge both provided dedicated leadership to these roles for the last several years.

Some noted changes in the department's administrative staff occurred. Suzanne Easterly became Academic Administrator, filling the opening created when Janet Fischer assumed a new role in the Provost's Office. Brett Groshong replaced Peter Maloof as Systems Analyst. David Crowley accepted the newly created position of Web Developer, a role that will interface with the Institute's OpenCourseWare initiative.

We are again proud of the faculty achievements this year and especially wish to note the following awards. Professor Robert A. Brown, currently the MIT Provost, was elected to the National Academy of Science (NAS), recognizing his many contributions to scientific research and leadership. Professor Douglas A. Lauffenberger was elected to both the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Professor Gregory Stephanopoulos received the R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering, sponsored by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). Professor Herbert H. Sawin was elected as a fellow in the American Vacuum Society. Professor Robert Langer received the Glaxo Wellcome International Achievement Award from the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. Professor Emeritus János Beér received the George Westinghouse Gold Medal form the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Robin Elices of the Administrative Services Office was recognized by MIT with a Financial Group Infinite Mile Award.

The DuPont-MIT Alliance (DMA) in Bio-Based Materials, established with the goal of catalyzing research and education at the biology/materials interface, began operation during this past year; with Professors Robert Cohen and Douglas Lauffenburger serving as MIT Associate Directors, along with Provost Robert Brown as MIT Director. The Department of Chemical Engineering is a prominent participant in DMA, with a number of faculty leading or involved in multi-investigator research projects. These faculty members include Robert Cohen, Linda Griffith, Paula Hammond, Alan Hatton, Klavs Jensen, Paul Laibinis, Robert Langer, Douglas Lauffenburger, Gregory Stephanopoulos, and Daniel Wang.

The Molecular Engineering of Biological and Chemical Systems (MEBCS) was initiated in 2001 as one of the five graduate programs under the Singapore-MIT Alliance, a joint educational and research enterprise between MIT, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU). Chaired by Professor Jackie Ying (MIT) and Professor Miranda Yap (NUS), the MEBCS program offers two innovative courses of study that integrate a molecular-level understanding of biological and chemical phenomena with advances in process engineering for the life sciences and fine chemical industries. The professional master's (S.M.) degree program prepares graduates for the shaping and solving of complex problems through rigorous coursework, which presents advanced engineering concepts tying together multiple-length scales-molecular, microscopic and macroscopic-through a close coupling to biological, chemical and materials sciences. The S.M. degree offers students an opportunity to interact with the MIT faculty during the Immersion Program on the MIT campus. Additionally, S.M. students participate in two intensive six-week Industrial Immersion projects at international pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals companies. The Ph.D. degree program prepares graduates for advanced careers in industrial research and development centers, research institutes, and academia, with emphasis on synthesis skills, engineering design and interdisciplinary approaches. It includes advanced coursework and independent research with a full semester of study and research at MIT. Students conduct novel research under the joint supervision of MIT and Singapore faculty on structured fluids, surface functionalization, microstructure tailoring, and materials design in relation to fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals synthesis as well as on molecular and cellular aspects of biotechnology, genomics, bioinformatics, proteomics, drug design, and delivery that underlie advanced bioengineering.

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Undergraduate Education

The undergraduate program remains strong with excellent students. We have completed a review of the undergraduate curriculum, which has resulted in the proposal of several significant changes. We will be introducing a new subject, 10.10 Introduction to Chemical Engineering, which will be the first proposed required subject for the major, as well as serving as a subject to introduce freshmen to Chemical Engineering. In addition, the Integrated Chemical Engineering (ICE) sequence in the senior year will be restructured to allow more time to consider the design process. Employment opportunities for our graduates remain strong across a wide variety of industries, including biotechnology, semiconductor fabrication and consulting, as well as the traditional chemical and petroleum industries.

Junior Desirée Ramirez received a Martin Luther King Leadership Award for her devotion to improving racial and cultural interaction within the MIT community. In addition, the Howard W. Johnson Award for the male senior athlete of the year was given to Stefan K. Bewley, a standout in both water polo and swimming.

Graduate Education

The total for 2000-2001 includes 73 foreign students, 59 female students, and 32 minority students (not including Asian-Americans). Graduate admissions data suggest that graduate enrollment will remain in the low 200s for the foreseeable future.

Chemical Engineering graduate students, Chen Wang and Brian Stoll received Graduate Student Council Teaching Awards at the MIT Awards Convocation on May 14, 2001. The first prize for the MIT $50K Entrepreneurship Competition was made to Chemical Engineering students Edward S. Ahn and Darren D. Obrigkeit for their idea to develop and market a new technique for repairing bone injuries.

The department's new Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering Practice (Ph.D.C.E.P.) program welcomed its first entering group of five graduate students in September of 2000, jointly by Chemical Engineering and the Sloan School of Management. The program's integrated content includes core Chemical Engineering principles and practice, independent research, and a solid grounding in the principles of business and management. The five students, representing undergraduate institutions ranging from the Georgia Institute of Technology to the University of Tokyo, all successfully completed the department's core graduate curriculum, passed through the doctoral qualifying procedures and selected their doctoral thesis research topics. In the summer of 2001, PhDCEP students are attending the School of Chemical Engineering Practice, returning at the end of August to re-engage in their thesis research and to welcome the second class of Ph.D.C.E.P. students to the campus. A Ph.D.C.E.P. faculty steering committee, chaired by Bob Cohen with members Greg Rutledge, Alan Hatton and Charlie Cooney, has been set up to monitor the progress of students in this new doctoral program.

Twenty-eight students participated in the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice program during the 2000-2001 sessions. Last summer, students attended the stations at Alkermes, Cambridge, MA; Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation in Mizushima, Japan; and GE Plastics in Mount Vernon, NY. In the fall, the operating stations were GE Plastics and M&M*Mars Incorporated in Hackettstown, NJ, while spring saw the students again at GE Plastics and Cargill. This summer, in addition to the Alkermes and Mitsubishi sites, students have been working on food processing projects at General Mills in Albuquerque, NM and Buffalo, NY. GE Plastics terminated as a permanent host station this spring, while Cargill plans to continue to run during spring semesters only. Dr. Paul Bryan continued as station director for the GE Plastics station and has been working with the General Mills group this summer. Dr. John Friedly directed the Cargill, Alkermes and Mars stations. Dr. Barry Johnston directed the station in Japan, assisted by Ms. Sonja Sharpe, in the summer of 2000. This summer, Mr. Brian Baynes assisted Dr. Bill Dalzell in the running of the Japan station. Professor T. Alan Hatton continues to direct the Practice School from Cambridge. Ms. Carol Phillips, the Practice School Administrative Secretary, retired due to health reasons at the end of June 2000 and was succeeded temporarily by Ms. Arline Benford, who then passed the baton on to Ms. Beth Tuths this past spring. It is with sadness that we report the passing of Ms. Phillips in November 2000 after a protracted bout with cancer.

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Faculty Notes

Professor Robert Armstrong continued as Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering during the academic year 2000-2001. He was elected to the Governing Board of the Council for Chemical Research (CCR) and serves on the Program Committee for the Annual Meeting of CCR. He also serves on the External Advisory Board and Visiting Committee for the Department of Chemical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He gave a seminar at the University of Minnesota.

Professor Paul I. Barton was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. He gave the Keynote Address at the International Symposium on Design, Operation and Control of Next Generation Chemical Plants (Process Systems Engineering, PSE Asia, 2000), Kyoto, Japan. He gave invited papers at the First Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, Washington D.C.; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Symposium on Computer Aided Control System Design, Anchorage, AK; and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX. He gave invited lectures at the Rheinisch-Westfœlische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH-Aachen), Germany; Laboratoire des Sciences du Génie Chimique (CNRS-ENSIC), Nancy, France; and the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing, Heidelberg University, Germany. He joined the editorial board of Chemical Engineering and Processing and continued to serve as the AIChE's Group 10C Programming Coordinator. He served on the International Programming Committee for DYCOPS-6 (6th Symposium on Dynamics and Control of Process Systems).

Professor Daniel Blankschtein was a Keynote Speaker at the New England Chapter of the Society of Cosmetic Chemists, and an invited speaker at the CABOT Corporation Laser Quality Summit. He continues to serve on the Editorial Boards of Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science and Marcel Dekker's Surfactant Science Series. Professor Blankschtein was recently appointed Graduate Officer in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Professor Howard Brenner received the 2001 Caribbean Congress of Fluid Mechanics award at their triennial meeting at Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela, in addition to receiving a Distinguished Alumni Citation from the Pratt Institute, his undergraduate alma mater. He served as a member of the Chemical Engineering Peer Review Committee of the National Academy of Engineering. During the year, he presented invited seminars at the Universities of Illinois (both Chicago Circle and Champaign-Urbana), Wisconsin, Florida, and Alabama, as well as at the Illinois Institute of Technology and Simón Bolívar University. Additionally, he presented or co-presented papers at meetings of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the American Physical Society Fluid Dynamics Division, the Society of Rheology, and the American Chemical Society Division of Colloid Science, as well as at the International Workshop on Miscible Fluids in Paris.

Professor Robert A. Brown continued serving as Provost at MIT, a position he has held since 1998. He was Plenary Lecturer at the American Association of Crystal Growth Meeting (AACG-12) in August 2000 and at the International Workshop on Crystal Growth Modeling in October 2000. Professor Brown continued to serve as Executive Editor of the Journal of Chemical Engineering Science and as a member of the National Research Council decadal study on the Frontiers in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. Among other forms of service, Professor Brown continued to serve on the International Academic Advisory Panel (IAAP) to the Government of Singapore and as Director of the DuPont-MIT Alliance at MIT. He was elected to the National Academy of Science in spring of 2001.

Professor Charles L. Cooney continued to serve as the Executive Officer of the Department with plans to step down as of June 30, 2001. He is on the Board of the MIT Community Services Fund. He is the Co-Director of the Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals (CAMP), an industry consortium jointly run with Purdue University to support research on pharmaceutical manufacturing and continues as Co-Director of the Program on the Pharmaceutical Industry (POPI), a joint program between the Schools of Engineering, Science and Management. He has continued his participation on the external review committee for the Department of Chemical Engineering of the University of Cambridge and continues to co-chair an assessment team for technopreneurship programs in Singapore.

Professor William M. Deen and his laboratory continued its investigations in the areas of hindered transport in fibrous media, water and macromolecule filtration in kidney capillaries, and physico-chemical aspects of nitric oxide toxicity and carcinogenicity.

Professor Patrick S. Doyle joined the faculty in December 2000. He was invited to speak about his research in the area of microfluidics at the SmallTalk conference and MipTech Lab Automation conference, where he was awarded the 2001 PolyPops award for the best paper presented. Professor Doyle was also an invited lecturer at Harvard and DuPont.

Professor Karen K. Gleason will begin serving as the Chemical Engineering Department's Executive Officer in July 2001. Her primary focus in this position will be to improve the undergraduate experience for Course X majors. Professor Gleason's research group continues to invent and optimize new vapor deposition methods for organic coatings, which resulted in three US patent awards this past year. She was the Van Ness Lecturer at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and also an invited lecturer at the Universities of Wisconsin and Arizona, and at a number of international conferences, including the Toyko Electron Advanced Technology Forum (Japan), Fluorine in Coatings Conference (Belgium), and Colloquium on Plasma Processes (France). Several of her MIT swimming records set more than twenty years ago, fell this year. However, one still remains uncontested.

Professor William H. Green gave the Keynote Lecture at the fifth International Conference on Chemical Kinetics. He chaired a session on Combustion Reaction Engineering at the 2000 AIChE National Meeting, and was an invited lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Department of Energy (DOE) Combustion Conference, the eighth International Conference on Chemical Reaction Engineering, and the first MIT Conference on Computational Fluid and Solid Mechanics. He was invited to join the Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal of Chemical Kinetics, and to publish special invited articles reviewing his recent research in that journal and in Theoretical Chemistry Accounts.

Professor Linda Griffith continues to serve as the Principal Investigator on a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) project to develop tissue-based sensors for biological warfare agents, collaborating with R. Kamm, D. Schauer, J. Sherley, and S. Tannenbaum at MIT; J. Vacanti and R. Lee at the Harvard Medical School (HMS); and J. Wands at Brown University. This project has been further expanded into a DMA-supported effort to develop physiological models for effects of environmental agents. A broad patent on the technology has been granted and MIT is in licensing discussions. She also continues to work in the area of new polymers for tissue engineering and cell biology. She chaired a National Institutes of Health/National Science Foundation (NIH/NSF) workshop on training and education in bioengineering, medical engineering and bioinformatics and gave a plenary lecture at the NIH Conference on Reparative Medicine. She gave several invited talks at conferences, other universities, and government panels. At MIT, she continues to serve as the Associate Director of Education for the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center (BPEC), the faculty advisor for the Biomedical Engineering Society, and as head of the Biotech Student Leadership Council.

Professor Paula T. Hammond was recently elected Vice Chair of the Polymer Area Programming Committee for the American Institute of Chemical Engineering. She was an invited lecturer at the International Pacifichem and Polymillenial meetings held in Hawaii in December 2000; these meetings were co-hosted by the American Chemical Society and the chemical societies of Japan and countries in the Pacific Rim. She was also an invited lecturer at several international and national meetings, companies, and universities, including the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, the University of Toronto and the German-American Frontiers of Polymer Science Meeting. Dr. Hammond served as American Chemical Society (ACS) Symposium Chair for "Macromolecular Self Assembly at Surfaces and Interfaces" at the April 2001 ACS National Meeting. Professor Hammond was recently appointed the Joseph R. Mares Associate Professor Career Development Chair effective July 1, 2001.

Professor T. Alan Hatton continued to serve as Director of the School of Chemical Engineering Practice at MIT. Keynote talks were given at the International Association of Colloid and Interface Scientists (IACIS) 2000 (Bristol, UK) and ACS National (Washington DC) and invited presentations at Particles 2001 (Orlando, FL) and ACS National (San Diego, CA) Meetings, and at the joint Beijing AIChE/China University Chemical Engineering (CUChE) meeting. Other invited presentations were given at Tianjin University (China), Merck (West Point, PA), and the California Institute of Technology, in addition to many other presentations at national and international meetings. Professor Hatton played a significant role in establishing the "Molecular Engineering of Biological and Chemical Systems" program under the Singapore-MIT Alliance, and is spearheading the joint Cambridge University/MIT Practice School program under the Cambridge-MIT Institute initiative. He serves on the editorial boards of a number of scientific journals.

Professor Jack B. Howard continues to serve as Director of the Center on Airborne Organics involving MIT, the California Institute of Technology, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He continues to do collaborative research with Professor J.B. Vander Sande (MSE) on flame synthesized fullerenic carbon materials. He gave invited lectures at University of Michigan on ultrafine atmospheric particles from combustion sources; and at Technische Universitæt Darmstadt in Darmstadt, Germany; and Université de Haute Alsace in Mulhouse, France on combustion synthesis of fullerenes.

Professor Klavs F. Jensen received the 2000 R.H. Wilhelm Award for reaction engineering from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Professor Jensen continued research on multiscale modeling of reactive processes for thin film deposition, microfabricated chemical systems for synthesis and analysis (in collaboration with Martin A. Schmidt [EECS]), novel quantum dot composite materials for optical devices (in collaboration research with M. G. Bawendi [Chemistry]). He gave several invited presentations on multiscale modeling of thin film deposition and on microchemical systems at the national and international conferences, including Foundations of Molecular Modeling and Simulation, International Symposium on Chemical Reaction Engineering, Krakow, Poland; First SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, September 2000, Washington, DC; and at universities. He continued to serve on the Defense Science Research Council and co-chaired the National Research Councils workshop on future chemical and chemical engineering opportunities in materials chemistry. He was elected to the editorial board of the Royal Chemical Society's new journal, Lab on a Chip, and to the programming committee for micrototal analysis systems (laboratory on a chip) annual conferences.

Professor Paul E. Laibinis was an invited lecturer at the University of Washington, Zhejiang University, 3M, IBM, Agilent, Millipore, and various other industrial laboratories. He gave invited presentations at the Gordon Research Conference on Chemistry at Interfaces (New Hampshire), the 3rd Joint China/USA Chemical Engineering Conference (Beijing), and the 2nd Chemical Engineering Conference for Collaborative Research in Eastern Mediterranean (Ankarra). In 2001, Professor Laibinis was appointed to the editorial boards of the journals Langmuir and Sensors and to the Victor K. LaMer Award Committee of the Colloid and Surface Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. He was a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Opportunities in Biotechnology for the US Army and served as Chair of a departmental committee on Graduate Curriculum that provided a substantial revision to the course requirements for doctoral students, to begin in fall 2001. Professor Laibinis is also a Faculty Fellow in the new Singapore-MIT Alliance Program on the Molecular Engineering of Biological and Chemical Systems.

Professor Robert Langer received a number of awards including the Glaxo Wellcome International Achievement Award (Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain), Millennial Pharmaceutical Scientist Award (Millennial World Congress of Pharmaceutical Sciences), First Pierre Galletti Award (American Institute of

Medicine and Biological Engineering), the Wallace Carothers Award (American Chemical Society) and an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. Dr. Langer has also been honored as the Herman Beerman Lecturer (Society for Investigative Dermatology), the Millennial Lecturer (University of Liverpool), the Bayer Lecturer (University of Pittsburgh), the Bayer-Stein Honorary Lecturer (University of Massachusetts at Amherst), the William G. Lowrie Lectureship (Ohio State University), the Frank T. Gucker Lecturer (Indiana University) and the First Patten Distinguished Lectureship (University of Colorado at Boulder).

Professor Douglas A. Lauffenburger was elected this past year to membership in the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. On the MIT campus, he continues as co-director of the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health, Director of the Biotechnology Process Engineering Center, and associate director of the MIT-DuPont Alliance in Bio-Based Materials. On the national level, he is serving on the Advisory Council for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, and this current year is Chair of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering.

Professor Gregory C. Rutledge delivered a series of invited lectures in the fall of 2000 as the H.A. Morton Distinguished Visiting Professor of the Department of Polymer Science at the University of Akron, one of the leading institutes of polymer science and engineering in the country. He also presented invited or Keynote Lectures at the University of Pisa, Suranaree University (Thailand), the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (University of Minnesota), Polymer 2001 (a joint meeting of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Materials and the Institute of Physics, Bath, UK), the Fiber Society (Raleigh, NC) and the 4th International Discussion Meeting on Relaxations in Complex Systems (Crete, Greece). He taught professional courses on computer modeling of polymers for both the American Chemical Society and the American Physical Society in 2000-2001. He has continued to serve as Chairman of the Chemical Engineering Department Graduate Admissions Committee and in addition assumed responsibilities as the director of the Program in Polymer Science and Technology at MIT. He also serves on the editorial boards of Polymer and of Computational and Theoretical Polymer Science.

Professor Kenneth A. Smith has continued his research on the roles of fluid mechanics and transport phenomena in a number of contexts. These include use of the supercritical water oxidation process for destruction of organic wastes (jointly with Professor J. W. Tester) and the dynamics of micellar self-assembly (jointly with Professor T. A. Hatton). He is also engaged in the development of an instrument that can determine the size-segregated chemical composition of an aerosol and do so in real time. During the spring, Professor Smith was on sabbatical at the University of Cambridge, where he was a visiting faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering and an Overseas Fellow at Churchill College.

Professor George Stephanopoulos assumes the position of Chief Technology Officer for the Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation's (MCC) group of companies as of July 1, 2001, taking a leave of absence from MIT. During the period from September 2000 to July 2001, he presented the following lectures on the reformation of MCC's R&D organization: "R&D and Intellectual Properties Management under Integrated Strategies" at the International Technology Transfer Symposium in Tokyo, January 26, 2001; "Is there a Need for a New Process Systems Engineering?", Division of Process Systems Engineering, Japanese Society of Chemical Engineers, February 9, 2001 in Tokyo; and "From a Process-Centered to a Product-Centered Chemical Company: The Strategic Imperatives of the MCC-Group and its Implications," Technological Management in Polymer Industries (Koubunshi Douykai), in Tokyo, April 24, 2000. The short summer course taught by Professor Stephanopoulos, Bioinformatics: Principles, Methods, and Applications, was again offered at MIT in the summer of 2001.

Professor Gregory Stephanopoulos continued his educational and research activity in bioinformatics and metabolic engineering. This program aims at the integration of genomic information and physiological data for the elucidation of cell physiology leading to the rational modification and analysis of cell metabolism for medical and industrial applications. This program comprises a research component as well as courses on metabolic engineering and bioinformatics. Professor Stephanopoulos continued as co-editor of the journal Metabolic Engineering, published by Academic Press. In addition, he serves on the editorial boards of 7 other scientific journals. He delivered plenary lectures at the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) meetings in London (May and September, 2000), the European Symposium on Biochemical Engineering Science (Copenhagen, September 2000), the third Metabolic Engineering Conference (Colorado Springs, October, 2000), the Annual ACS meeting in San Diego (April 2001), the annual ASM meeting in Orlando (May 2001), and the Computer Aided Process Engineering ESCAPE 11 Conference in Copenhagen (May 2001). Professor Stephanopoulos was also recognized for his contributions to biotechnology by the Marvin J. Johnson Award of the Biotechnology Division of ACS (April 2001). For his research and educational activity in promoting the field of Metabolic Reaction Engineering, he won the 2001 Wilhelm Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. In May 2001, he was elected member of the International Faculty of the Technical University of Denmark.

Professor Jefferson W. Tester continued as the Director of the Energy Laboratory throughout the academic year 2000-2001. He served as Chair of the National Advisory Council of the DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and served as a member of the National Research Council's committee evaluating the DOE's Office of Power Technologies R&D programs. Professor Tester also continued as a member of the advisory group for the Paul Scherrer Institute, which is part of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology as well as his appointment to former Governor Cellucci's Advisory Council for the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust Fund. He was appointed to serve as a member of the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory's (INEEL) Division Review Committee on Nuclear and Energy Systems. Last year, he gave invited lectures at Washington State University, the University of Idaho, and ETH Zurich. He was also the recipient of the Department's Outstanding Faculty Award.

Professor Bernhardt L. Trout was named the Henry C. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Utilization for his work on clathrate-hydrates. He has given invited talks at the National University of Singapore and Georgia Institute of Technology, in addition to AIChE and ACS. Funding for his projects on chemical and process design via molecular understanding is provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Amgen, Inc., and Ford Motor Company.

Professor Daniel I. C. Wang was awarded an honorary doctoral degree in engineering from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in November 2000. He was also awarded in October 2000 the Temasek

Professorship for three years at the National University of Singapore, where he will spend time at the Bioprocessing Technology Centre to assist and collaborate in a number of research projects in the biomedical sciences. Professor Wang was the dinner speaker in January 2001 at the MIT Club of Singapore, where he addressed MIT alumni and SMA students and faculty on the future developments in biomedical sciences. He was a Keynote Lecturer at the Biochemical Engineering Conference in Sonoma, California in June 2001. He acted as the Chairman for the past year on a project on the "Standardization and Certification of Chinese Medicine," coordinating the activities of four Hong Kong universities. He is a member of the Advisory Committee for the Marine Biotechnology Center at the University of Hawaii and the University of California, Berkeley. Lastly, he has been appointed on the search committee for the Director of the Institute of Chemical Sciences in Singapore.

Professor Jackie Y. Ying was the recipient of the 2000 AIChE Allan P. Colburn Award for excellence in publications. She delivered twenty-one invited lectures at various international conferences and national meetings during the past year, including a plenary lecture at the third World-Wide Symposium on Inorganic Chemistry in Taiwan and a Keynote Lecture at the International Conference on Materials for Advanced Technologies in Singapore. She served as the co-organizer of the American Ceramic Society Symposium on Chemical Performance of Ceramics. Professor Ying was an invited seminar speaker at the University of Texas, Polytechnic University, National University of Singapore, Tulane University, North Carolina State University, Northeastern University, and the City College of New York. She was recently appointed to the editorial boards of Applied Catalysis A, Acta Materialia and Scripta Materialia, and serves on the editorial boards of six other journals/book series. Professor Ying is a Director of the AIChE Materials Engineering and Sciences Division, and an executive committee member of the American Chemical Society Colloid and Surface Chemistry Division. She Chairs the Singapore-MIT Alliance Program on Molecular Engineering of Biological and Chemical Systems.

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Research Highlights

Engineering Bioseparations in Microfluidics Devices (Professor Patrick S. Doyle)

Biological assays routinely call for the separation of proteins, DNA, and cells. The demand to perform these assays faster and with smaller sample volumes is rapidly spawning new developments in microfluidic and lab-on-a-chip devices. Professor Doyle's group has been working with Dr. Viovy at the Institut Curie to develop novel ways to rapidly separate large DNA using custom 'obstacle courses' as a sieving medium in lab-on-chip devices. The obstacle course is constructed from superparamagnetic colloids which self-assemble into a regular, rigid matrix when a magnetic field is applied. The matrix resembles a 2-dimensional array of posts through which the DNA are driven with an electric field. In contrast to standard polymer gel matrices, the colloidal arrays can have extremely large and homogenous pores (~1-20 μm), which is advantageous for separating large DNA. Experiments have shown that separations are an order of magnitude faster than standard techniques with these new matrices. The Doyle group has also been studying DNA separations at the single molecule level using fluorescence video-microscopy. By watching and analyzing how the molecules collide and slip past obstacles they hope to develop mechanistic theories, which can then be used to rationally design improved obstacle courses. The Doyle group has also begun to study the self-assembly of the superparamagnetic colloids themselves. The colloids are confined in channels that are of comparable size to the bead diameter. In such confined geometries the self-assembly process is extremely sensitive to channel geometry, surface topology and magnetic field history. The aim of this work is to be able to guide the self-assembly process to create tunable matrices for microfluidics applications.

Modeling, Simulation and Optimization of Process Dynamics (Professor Paul I. Barton)

Chemical and biological manufacturing processes are large and complex systems, regardless of the actual physical scale (e.g., oil refineries, micro power generation systems, biological cells). Understanding and manipulation of time dependent (or dynamic) phenomena are crucial to the engineering of such systems, and has impacts on process efficiency, process economics, process safety and environmental performance. The unifying theme of research in Professor Barton's laboratory is the study of such large-scale dynamic systems.

The chemical processing industries make extensive use of general-purpose mathematical modeling software that supports the formulation, debugging and numerical solution of large-scale dynamic models. The software systems ABACUSS II (Advanced Modeling Environment and Embedded Simulator) and DAEPACK (Differential-Algebraic Equation Package), under development in Professor Barton's laboratory, represent the state-of-the-art in this technology, implementing advances in the areas of problem representation, software design, and numerical algorithms.

Important problems in process operations include the design and optimization of major process transients such as start-up, shut-down, and changeovers, the design and verification of automatic safety systems for abnormal situation management, the interaction between these issues and plant/equipment design, and the design of inherently dynamic systems such as batch processes and periodic processes. In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that process behavior during such operational transients experiences significant discrete aspects superimposed on the underlying continuous dynamics governed by conservation principles. These discontinuities (triggered by events) may be caused by control actions and/or disturbances (e.g., starting/stopping pumps, the action of an interlock system, equipment failures, etc.), or caused by changes in the physical regime (e.g., thermodynamic phase changes, changes in the flow regime, irregularities in the geometry of vessels, etc.). A natural detailed modeling framework for such situations is that of hybrid (discrete/continuous) dynamic systems. Research in Professor Barton's laboratory has pioneered the development of theory and numerical methods for hybrid dynamic systems. These include contributions to the modeling, simulation, sensitivity analysis, and optimization of hybrid dynamic systems. For example, these advances demonstrate that a start-up procedure may be designed automatically by formulating the problem as a hybrid dynamic optimization.

The batch mode of process operation is experiencing a renaissance due to the increasing importance of the pharmaceutical, biochemical, and advanced materials industries. Batch processes are ideal for the flexible manufacturing of multiple products with small production volumes, and are, thus, favored by these high-technology industries. Batch processes are inherently dynamic systems that do not have a steady-state; instead, they are forced

by sequences of discrete control actions through their operational cycle. Professor Barton's laboratory has pioneered the development of detailed dynamic model-based techniques for the conceptual and detailed design of batch processes. Another thrust of research has focused on environmental issues in the design of pharmaceutical processes, using thermodynamic insights to develop processes that have highly integrated solvent recovery and recycling. This thrust has also motivated a number of contributions in the study of batch distillation of azeotropic mixtures (an azeotropic mixture does not change composition on boiling, which is a problem for separation via distillation because the intention is to exploit composition changes on boiling). For instance, we have invented novel batch distillation processes for azeotropic mixtures that can be applied on a small scale in a flexible manufacturing environment.

Increasingly, engineering problems in design and operations are being posed as formal optimization (or mathematical programming) problems. This has the advantage that, if a suitable algorithm is available, then an optimal design or operating policy may be found automatically, and often very non-intuitive solutions are discovered that improve the performance of the system significantly. Integer (binary) variables are often introduced to represent the choice of whether or not an element is to be included in the final design, or to represent the sequencing of events in an operational problem. The global solution of mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problems where the participating functions are nonconvex has been an unresolved problem in the literature until very recently, and work in Professor Barton's group has been amongst the first to develop suitable algorithms. Current work is now extending these advances to dynamic optimization problems that involve integer decisions.

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Departmental Awards

The Annual Awards Ceremony for the Department of Chemical Engineering was held on Monday, May 14, 2001 in Gilliland Auditorium. Professor and Department Head, Robert C. Armstrong, presided. The following are awards that were presented at the ceremony.

In collaboration with the Student Financial Aid Office, the James E. Cunningham '57 Scholarship was awarded to Tomoko Iida, a junior from Chiba, Japan and the John H. Dessauer Scholarship was awarded to senior, Deepa Patel, from Katy, Texas.

Merck Fellowships were acknowledged for two sophomore recipients: Bukola Aina from Philadelphia, PA and David Jackson from Spring, TX.

The recipient of the Dow Chemical Company Outstanding Junior Award was Lara Hawrylchak from Altamont, NY for her balanced record of achievement in academics and campus professional and social organizations, as well as work experience.

The Robert Haslam Cup was awarded to Christina Wilbert. She is a senior from Grand Rapids, MI and was recognized for outstanding professional promise in Chemical Engineering.

The Roger de Friez Hunneman Prize is the oldest in the Department and is given to an undergraduate for outstanding scholarship and research. This year, the award went to Philip Osafo-Kwaako from Korle-Bu, Accra, Ghana.

The Edward W. Merrill Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award was presented to Yonathan Thio, a graduate student from Purwokerto, Indonesia for his work with 10.213 in the fall. A second place award went to Vibha Srinivasan from New Delhi, India who was a Teaching Assistant for 10.32.

Every Monday, two graduate students present the progress of their research to be evaluated by their peers. Two graduate students were recognized for giving outstanding seminars. This year, recognition went to David Matheu, from Princeton, IL for his seminar during the fall term, and Suniti Moudgil from Gainesville, FL for her seminar during the spring term.

The Chemical Engineering Special Service Awards were given to Graduate Student Council (GSC) presidents John Locke from Loveland, CO and Patricia Sullivan from Canonsburg, PA. The current AIChE president, Princess Imoukhuede from Matteson, IL also received a Special Service Award.

The Chemical Engineering "Rock" Award for outstanding athletics, as voted by the graduate students of the Department went to Paul Ayers, from Cape Town, South Africa, for his active participation in a variety of intramural sports.

The Outstanding Employee Award was presented to Linda Mousseau, an administrative assistant for Professors Jackie Ying and Kenneth Smith, for her exceptional dedication to not only these professors but to the department as well.

The Outstanding Faculty Award from the graduate students went to Professor Jefferson Tester. The undergraduate students presented the Outstanding Faculty Award to Professor Michael Mohr.

Nominations for the Individual Accomplishment Citation were requested in the month of April and the recipient of the citation was Constance Beal. She was praised for her dedication to Professor Robert Langer's lab, and her huge contribution to the Network of Educators in Science and Technology (NEST) over the years.

Finally, three graduating seniors from the Department, Murat E. Kara, Tamara N. Oei, and Philip Osafo-Kwaako, were recognized for their nominations into the Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Robert C. Armstrong, Karen K. Gleason

More information about the Chemical Engineering Department can be found online at http://web.mit.edu/cheme/.

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