Mr. Josh Middaugh
Ph.D. Candidate

Mailing Address: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Chemical Engineering 6-020, 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 Lab Phone: 617-253-5370 Office Phone: 617-253-1975 Fax: 617-324-0066 middaugh@mit.edu

I grew up in a small town in rural Pennsylvania named Hunlock Creek, which appears on some maps of northeastern PA.  I went to Penn State University (PSU) where I mistakenly embarked upon studies in civil engineering.  I still remember the professor in my “First-year seminar in civil engineering” class telling us stories about all the courses we would take on asphalt concrete.  It all sounded like torture to me.  So, I switched majors to chemical engineering on the whim that I enjoyed my freshman mathematics and chemistry classes.  Thereafter, I was sure I made the right choice since chemical engineering kept my curiosity alive (I think my curiosity about asphalt would have been dead before the first course was over).  Also, if it wasn’t for my chemical engineering classes, I wouldn’t have met my fiancé, Kimberly, who was also a chemical engineering student at PSU.

While at PSU, I was a tutor for freshman and sophomore chemistry classes, and I was a mentor for the Engineering Mentorship Program.  For my Schreyer’s Honors College thesis, I worked for Dr. Bruce Logan http://www.engr.psu.edu/ce/enve/logan.htm in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department on the topic of microbial fuel cells.  In particular, I explored new anode coatings that were hoped to make economically and structurally favorable anode materials perform better.  And, even though only one of the coatings I tested showed marginal improvement over the control, I learned the valuable lesson that even negative results can be useful (at least for knowing what not to do).  I also had a co-op assignment at Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.  During those eight months, I designed and built a pressure-vacuum swing adsorption process development unit that separated oxygen from air.  Finally, I volunteered to participate in a test program for my senior design project through Penn State’s Learning Factory.  This was exciting since this was the first time the chemical engineering department had interdisciplinary teams working for real corporate sponsors.  Also, it was fun since we got to design and prototype a hydrogen-liquid-carrier storage and delivery system for fuel cell vehicles. 
After graduating from Penn State, I worked temporarily at Abbot Bioresearch Center in Worcester, MA.  There, I tested a Protein A purification system for purifying antibodies that had a substantial cost and time savings over the traditional methods.  I was able to show that the purification method did not alter the quality of the drug product, and I introduced simple, but previously unused, statistical methods to the toolset for comparing product quality data from different experiments.

At present, I am conducting research in Professor W. H. Green’s Combustion Dynamics Laboratory at MIT.  In particular, I am studying the kinetics of reactions that are important in combustion using laser spectroscopy to probe the concentration of short-lived intermediate species.  The transient concentrations that are measured can be used to determine rate coefficients and fluxes through particular reaction pathways.  The ultimate goal of this research is to more accurately determine the rate coefficients for a number of important reactions so that better, more accurate models of combustion systems can be developed.