Georgia Tech's ChBE Magazine 2018

ChBE

2018

School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering

23

ChBE Professors Hold Editorships at Top Technical Journals

Pictured clockwise from top left: Elsa Reichmanis, executive editor of Chemistry of Materials; Nga Lee “Sally” Ng, editor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics; Martha Grover, section editorin-chief of Processes; and Chris Jones, editor-in-chief of ACS Catalysis.

Contents 1

Strength and Breadth: ChBE by the Numbers

2

Editorships

4

Funding of Research Centers

5

New Books by Faculty

6

In the Lab

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Faculty News

10

Alumni Features/News

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Student News/Honors

Think Big. Solve Big.

A Message from DAVID SHOLL, John F. Brock III School Chair Welcome to the 2018 ChBE Magazine! I was recently reappointed to my role as School Chair by the College’s Dean for a second five-year term, and am thrilled to continue to be part of the many activities taking place within ChBE. This is an appropriate time for me to reflect on the School’s positive trajectory.

Ten years ago, our undergraduate program was ranked #12 in the country

by U.S. News and World Report. Today we are ranked #2 in the country, and we are the most highly ranked program at a public university.

We were also recently ranked the #6 chemical engineering program in the world in the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’s Academic Ranking of World

Universities. It is wonderful to see that the rest of the world is appreciating what we have known for a long time: Georgia Tech is a wonderful place to be a chemical engineer!

In this issue of our magazine, you can read about the influence our faculty are having on their professional communities as journal editors, the success of multiple large research centers at Georgia Tech, the amazing research achievements of our graduate students, and the many activities taking place in our undergraduate program.

As always, I would love to hear from you. If you are passing through Atlanta, please come and visit so we can catch up on your activities and so you can see what is new on campus and in ChBE.

About ChBE Established in 1901, the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) is one of eight schools in the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Ranked among the top 10 engineering programs in the nation for both its graduate and undergraduate programs by U.S. News & World Report, the School is one of the oldest and most diverse programs in the country.

CONTACTS: Main Office: ( 404) 894-1838 Chair’s Office: ( 404) 894-2867 Undergraduate Program: ( 404) 894-2865 ugrad.info@chbe.gatech.edu Graduate Program: ( 404) 894-2877 grad.info@chbe.gatech.edu Communications Committee: Brad Dixon (editor), Michael Filler, Dennis Hess, Elsa Reichmanis, David Sholl, and Jacqueline Mohalley Snedeker

STRENGTH & BREADTH ChBE by the Numbers

#6

best chemical engineering department in the world, according to the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy’s Academic Ranking of World Universities

#2

Georgia Tech is the LARGEST chemical engineering undergraduate program in the Top 10 of the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

#1

Best Undergraduate ChBE Programs

#7

- U.S. News & World Report, 2019

Best Graduate ChBE Programs

#4 America’s Best Undergraduate Engineering Colleges

- U.S. News & World Report, 2018

- U.S. News & World Report, 2019

among U.S. Chemical Engineering departments in Taiwan National University’s “Performance Ranking of Scientific Papers for World Universities”

Students 1000+ undergraduates 196 graduate students • 178 PhD and 18 MS

Faculty

7

18

Faculty members elected to the National Academy of Engineering

National Science Foundation Career Award winners on the faculty

10

37 core faculty members (10 women) 6 affiliated faculty 3 academic professionals

AIChE Fellows serving on the faculty :

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23 ChBE Faculty Members Hold Major Editorial Positions with Top Technical Journals With one of the largest faculties among U.S. chemical engineering programs, Georgia Tech’s ChBE has 23 professors who serve as editors for top academic journals in related fields.

The time, energy, and expertise they contribute in these leadership roles helps to advance science.

These professors play a critical role in defining what is considered good and important research.

Being invited to serve in an editorial capacity reflects the respect that faculty members have attained in their academic communities.

Having so many ChBE professors serve in these prestigious positions shows why ChBE’s reputation for excellence continues to grow, notes ChBE School Chair David Sholl.

Julie Champion Co-Section Editor (Drug Delivery Section) Current Opinion in Colloid and Interface Science

Martha Grover Section Editor-in-Chief Processes

Rachel Chen Associate Editor Microbial Cell Factories

Dennis Hess Editor-in-Chief Electrochemical Society (ECS) Journal of Solid State Science and Technology

John Crittenden Associate Editor Environmental Science & Technology

Associate Editor Journal of Process Control

Chris Jones Editor-in-Chief ACS Catalysis

Executive Associate Editor-in-Chief, Frontiers of Chemical Science & Engineering

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Yulin Deng Associate Topic Editor Nanomaterials and Nanotechnology

Ravi Kane Associate Editor Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Tom Fuller Technical Editor Journal of the Electrochemical Society

Ryan Lively Associate Editor Chemical Engineering Science

SCHOOL OF CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING, GEORGIA TECH

Hang Lu Associate Editor Lab on a Chip

Carsten Sievers Editor Applied Catalysis A: General

Carson Meredith Chief Editor Emergent Materials

Natalie Stingelin Associate Editor Journal of Materials Chemistry C Associate Editor npj Flexible Electronics

Sankar Nair Executive Editor Chemical Engineering Science

Mark Styczynski Editor Mathematical Biosciences

Nga Lee “Sally” Ng Editor Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics

Krista Walton Associate Editor Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research

Matthew Realff Editor-in-Chief Advanced Manufacturing and Processing

Younan Xia Associate Editor Nano Letters

Elsa Reichmanis Executive Editor Chemistry of Materials

David Sholl Senior Editor Langmuir

“Having the opportunity to serve as an Executive Editor for Chemistry of Materials provides early access to significant research results not only in my areas of interest, but also in materials chemistry engineering more generally. It’s a great way to keep up with what’s going on! One of the more challenging aspects can be identifying reviewers who will respond in a timely manner.” - Elsa Reichmanis Ajit Yoganathan Editor-in-Chief Cardiovascular Engineering and Technology

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NSF-Simons Project Explores New Frontiers in Math, Biology A new national project, which includes the Georgia Institute of Technology, aims to convey the benefits of physics’ age-old intertwining with mathematics upon biology, a science historically less connected with math.

The National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation have launched a large collaboration of bioscientists and mathematicians to advance both fields.

The project will have four centers funded with a total of $40 million, one of which is headquartered at Georgia Tech and will receive 25 percent of the funding.

For centuries, together mathematics and physics have shifted paradigms in science and rattled human perception by predicting planetary orbits, theorizing relativity, or explaining how one particle can be in two places at the same

time. Can theoretical math and biosystems team up to similarly shake the foundations of knowledge?

“Math can potentially change the way we do our experiments,” says ChBE Professor Hang Lu, who is associate director of the Tech-based center. “If you model your data with topology “Math can potentially change the way we do (a field of mathematics) our experiments” - Professor Hang Lu you see that your data can have a shape. And University of California, Irvine; and that can make you go look for difNorthwestern University. Together, ferent kinds of data.”

The Southeast Center for Math- they will not only advance the math-biosciences synergy, but also ematics and Biology is one of four spread their knowledge to hunNSF-Simons Research Centers for dreds of undergraduate and K-12 Mathematics of Complex Biologistudents throughout the region cal Systems. The other three are through educational outreach. based at Harvard University; the

DOE Renews Funding for Energy Frontier Research Center

“Our results will ultimately enable us to accelerate materials discovery for largescale energy applications.” - Professor Krista Walton 4

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has renewed funding for The Center for Understanding and Control of Acid-Gas-Induced Evolution of Materials for Energy (UNCAGE-ME).

Established in 2014 with a $11.2 milllion grant from DOE, UNCAGE-ME is expected to receive an additional $12 million-plus through 2022.

UNCAGE-ME is one of 42 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC) funded this year by DOE to accelerate the scientific breakthroughs needed to strengthen U.S. economic leadership and energy security.

Krista Walton, a ChBE professor, is the director of the Georgia Tech center, which advances the understanding

SCHOOL OF CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING, GEORGIA TECH

of how acid gases interact with energy-related materials.

“The overall goal of our EFRC is to provide a fundamental understanding of acid-gas interactions with a broad class of materials and establish strategies for extending material stability and lifetime,” Walton says.

“Our results will ultimately enable us to accelerate materials discovery for largescale energy applications.”

U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry says, “By mobilizing the talents of our nation’s top scientists and forging them into powerful, pro-active teams, the EFRC program will help ensure America’s leadership in the development of critical energy technologies and innovations.”

Hess Writes Leadership Book for Engineers, Scientists Professor Dennis Hess wants to help prepare engineers and scientists with the skills required for leadership roles.

Not only has he developed a leadership course for chemical engineering majors, he also recently published his first book on the subject, Leadership by Engineers and Scientists: Professional Skills Needed to Succeed in a Changing World.

Published by AIChE in association with Wiley, the book grew out of the leadership course Hess began teaching in recent years for both graduates and undergraduates after realizing that they could benefit from having some background in leadership as viewed through their technical background and mindset.

He reflected on his time as a leader and how he, as a technical person, interacted with non-technical people and dealt with biases, values, priorities, and beliefs of individuals.

“I realized that I think about

Fuller Publishes Electrochemical Engineering Text

level leadership positions,” he said. “And people in those positions deal with somewhat different types of problems than the ones you deal with early in your career.”

The book is brief by design, fewer than 250 pages, with lots of references for more information. It is written as a textbook, with homework questions as well as many discussion questions and scenarios, and ways to think about some of the situations. Hess has things in a certain begun using the book in way. I interact his class and believes it mostly with techniwill be useful to others. cal people, and with “Anyone who is very few people considering or has outside the technirecently been placed in cal field. The biggest a leadership position issues you encounshould benefit from the ter are soft-skill perspective offered in this book,” issues,” he says. he says.

After his second time teaching “If you aren’t in a formal leaderthe course, Hess decided to turn his ship position, it will help you to unclass notes and slides into his first derstand what your manager is gobook. “Leadership books are usuing through. And this should help ally written by MBAs because they you become a better employee.” are frequently the people in high-

Sholl Pens First Novel

David Sholl recently published a novel Polyphony, which Amazon describes as “a fast-paced Thomas Fuller has published novel confronting the Electrochemical Engineering challenges of modern (Wiley), a comprehensive drug discovery, the vital reference for scientists and nature of life-prolonging engineers working with medicines, and ultimately electrochemical processes and a the limits of knowledge.” rigorous textbook for students.

Describing the book’s origins, Sholl explains, “I Merging theoretical concepts with widespread application, this book is designed to provide critical knowledge realized that I travel a lot, so I decided that instead in a real-world context. Beginning with the fundamental of reading a book or doing whatever else on a plane, that for a year or so I would try and write someprinciples underpinning the field, the discussion moves thing while I sat on planes. It ended up taking a bit into industrial and manufacturing processes that blend central ideas to provide an advanced understanding while more than a year, but that was the idea behind it, to see if I could do it.” explaining observable results.

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in the lab

Material Formed from Crab Shells, Trees Could Replace Flexible Plastic Packaging From liquid laundry detergent packaged in cardboard to compostable plastic cups, consumer products these days are increasingly touting their sustainable and renewable origins.

Now Georgia Tech researchers led by Professor Carson Meredith have created a material derived from crab shells and tree fibers

that has the potential to replace the flexible plastic packaging used to keep food fresh.

The new material, described in Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering, is made by spraying multiple layers of chitin from crab shells and cellulose from trees to form a flexible film similar to plastic packaging film.

Assessing State of the Art in Nanowire Growth

Semiconductor nanowires have emerged as promising building blocks for next-generation electronic, energy conversion, and phototonic devices (e.g. solar panels and lasers). Therefore, better understanding how to direct nanowire growth is vital, according to ChBE researchers.

In a cover paper in the journal Accounts of Chemical Research, Associate Professor Michael Filler and former postdoc Martin Ek reviewed the state-of-the-art understanding of the thermodynamic and kinetic phenomena that control the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth of semiconductor wires.

“A range of materials and devices have been produced by VLS growth, but plenty of challenges remain: many desirable structures cannot currently be made, and even for those structures that can be made, the parameter window—in terms of, e.g., temperatures and pressures—is often narrow,” Filler explains.

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“The main benchmark that we compare it to is PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, one of the most common petroleumbased materials in the transparent packaging you see in vending machines and soft drink bottles.”

Nanotexturing Creates Bacteria-Killing Spikes on Stainless Steel Surfaces By using an electrochemical etching process on a common stainless steel alloy, ChBE researchers have created a nanotextured surface that kills bacteria while not harming mammalian cells.

Their findings were reported in ACS Biomaterials Science & Engineering. If additional research supports early results, the process might be used to attack microbial contamination on implantable medical devices and food processing equipment made with the metal.

While the specific mechanism by which the nanotextured material kills bacteria requires further study, the researchers believe tiny spikes and other nanoprotrusions created on the surface puncture bacterial membranes to kill the bugs.

The surface structures don’t

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appear to have a similar effect on mammalian cells. Beyond the anti-bacterial effects, the nano-texturing also appears to improve corrosion resistance.

“This surface treatment has potentially broad-ranging implications because stainless steel is so widely used, and so many of the applications could benefit,” says Associate Professor Julie Champion.

“A lot of the antimicrobial approaches currently being used add some sort of surface film, which can wear off.

Because we are actually modifying the steel itself, that should be a permanent change to the material.”

With Metamaterials, Hideand-Seek Gets High-tech

Imagine your neighbor had a rock band, and when they practiced in the garage, you wouldn’t even know. That’s the kind of real-life situation Assistant Professor Martin Maldovan is working to create.

He is exploring how to develop acoustic cloaking that bends a sound wave. It’s a form that uses “metamaterials,” which interact with physical phenomena in unnatural ways. The metamaterials are created by arranging individual atoms of plastic, glass, or metal into nano and microscale structures, and then building materials from them.

Typical soundproofing is achieved through materials that absorb sound waves. But cloaking would use a metamaterial that sound waves don’t affect – the waves would flow around the material and meet, unaffected, on the other side. An “outer shell” of this material could hide noise generated outside of a building.

Maldovan and grad student Juan Manuel Restrepo-Flórez published research on this cloaking in Applied Physics Letters.

World’s Fastest Creature May Also Be One of the Smallest Ask most people to identify the fastest animal on Earth and they’ll suggest a cheetah, falcon, or even a sailfish. To that list of speedy animals, Assistant Professor Saad Bhamla would like to add the Spirostomum ambiguum, a tiny single-celled protozoan that achieves blazing-fast acceleration while contracting its worm-like body.

Common to many lakes and ponds, the Spirostomum ordinarily moves about using tiny hairs called cilia. But its claim to speed involves extremely rapid acceleration while contracting its body when startled. The creature can shorten its body by more than 60 percent in a few milliseconds, going from a four-millimeter flat ribbon to the shape of an American football – all without the kind of muscles humans use.

How it does that, particularly without damaging fragile internal structures, is part of a fouryear $800,000 NSF grant Bhamla received. The physics and mathematics of the answers could help advance nanotechnology and accelerate a new generation of robots barely large enough to see with the naked eye.

Study Suggests One in Five Chemistry Papers May Be Wrong Can companies rely on the results of one or two scientific studies to design a new industrial process or launch a new product?

In at least one area of materials chemistry, the answer may be yes — but only 80 percent of the time.

The replicability of results from scientific studies has become a major source of concern in the research community, particularly in the social sciences and biomedical sciences.

But many researchers in the fields of engineering and the hard sciences haven’t felt the same level of concern for independent

validation of their results. A study published in Chemistry of Materials that compared the results reported in thousands of papers published about the properties of metal organic framework (MOF) materials suggests the replicability problem should be a concern for materials researchers, too.

One in five studies of MOF materials examined by a research team led by Professor David Sholl were judged to be “outliers,” with results far beyond the error bars normally used to evaluate study results.

Whether the results can be

“What we found is that if you pull out any experiment at random, there’s a one in five chance that the results are completely wrong – not just slightly off, but not even close.” - David Sholl

more broadly applied to other areas of materials science awaits additional studies, Sholl says. This study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Sholl chose MOFs because they’re an area of interest to his lab – he develops models for the materials.

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faculty news Ronald Chance Received AIChE’s 2018 Lawrence B. Evans Award in Chemical Engineering Practice. The award, which includes $3,000, recognizes an individual for substantial lifetime achievement in one or more aspects of industrial chemical engineering practice David Sholl Won the AIChE Institute Award for Excellence in Industrial Gases Technology for 2018.

Mark Prausnitz Elected to the College of Fellows of the Controlled Release Society. He is also a new Fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists.

Pamela Peralta-Yahya Received the NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research (MIRA) Award for “Olfactory receptor-based sensors for biomedical applications.”

Martha Grover Won this year’s David Himmelblau Award for Innovations in Computer-Based Chemical Engineering Education.

Yulin Deng and Thomas Fuller Elected as Fellows of AIChE. This is the highest grade of membership among the organization’s 60,000 members in 110 countries.

Ryan Lively Won the 2018 AIChE Separations Division FRI/John G. Kunesh Award. The award is sponsored by Fractionation Research Inc. (FRI).

Younan Xia Won the 2017 Materials Research Society Medal for “seminal contributions to shape-controlled synthesis of metal nanocrystals with major impact on catalysis, plasmonics, and biomedicine.”

Sally Ng and Younan Xia Designated as “highly cited researchers” by Clarivate Analytics.

Nian Liu and Ryan Lively Named “Up-and-Coming” Researchers by Chemistry of Materials.

Victor Breedveld Won AIChE’s Outstanding Student Chapter Advisor for the 2017-2018 school year. Also won the Innovation and Excellence in Laboratory Instruction Award, presented by Georgia Tech’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

Sally Ng Won an award from The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation’s Postdoctoral Program in Environmental Chemistry. The award provides $120,000 over two years to the principal investigator to appoint a postdoctoral fellow.

Corey Wilson Received two NSF Grants to develop a transcriptional programming language and a complementary biological memory structure. In the last year, Wilson has raised approximately $1 million in single PI research funds from the NSF. Andreas Bommarius, Martha Grover, and Ron Rousseau Awarded a multimillion dollar FDA contract to investigate the continuous manufacturing of beta-lactam antibiotics, such as amoxicillin or cephalexin.

Mark Styczynski Elected president of the Metabolomics Association of North America (MANA), which was launched in 2017.

Martin Maldovan Awarded a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant for “Modified Thermal Density of States in III-V Semiconductor Compounds via Thermocrystals for the Inhibition of R-G Recombination.”

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Lively Receives DOE’s Early Career Award Associate Professor Ryan Lively recently won the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science financial award for Early Career Research Programs. This is the third DOE Early Career Award given to Georgia Tech and the first for ChBE. He is one of 84 scientists across the nation – 54 at universities and 30 at national laboratories –selected by DOE to receive this funding in 2018.

The DOE Early Career Research Program, now in its ninth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early-career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.

Through this program, university-based researchers will receive grants of at least $150,000 per year

“Supporting talented researchers early in their career is key to building and maintaining a skilled and effective scientific workforce for the nation.” - U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry

for five years. The grants cover salary and research expenses.

Lively’s proposed experimental work will study the co-movement of organic molecules and

water within tiny pores found in disordered carbonaceous materials.

This experimental work will help address challenges in the areas of catalysis, geology, and industrial separations, the latter of which is the focus of the work.

The experiments and analysis conducted by Lively and his team will lay the foundation for new membrane-based industrial separations technology capable of augmenting or even displacing existing energy-intensive separations techniques such as distillation.

Lively, who earned his undergraduate and PhD degrees at Georgia Tech’s ChBE, joined the Institute’s faculty in 2013 and won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2017.

Reichmanis Wins AIChE, ACS Awards In 2018, Professor Elsa Reichmanis received both AIChE’s Margaret H. Rousseau Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement by a Woman Chemical Engineer and the American Chemical Society's (ACS) National Award in the Chemistry of Materials.

The AIChE award, sponsored

by Pfizer, consists of a plaque and a $5,000 honorarium. It is presented to a woman member of AIChE who has made significant contributions to chemical engineering research or practice – in academic, industrial, or government settings – over the course of her career.

Reichmanis will receive the award at the Institute’s Honors Ceremony, held during AIChE’s 2018 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania Reichmanis received the ACS

award, sponsored by DuPont and including $5,000, at the 255th ACS National Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 20.

With nearly 157,000 members, the American Chemical Society (ACS) is the world’s largest scientific society and one of the world’s leading sources of authoritative scientific information.

Reichmanis holds the Pete Silas Chair in Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research group works at the interface of chemical engineering, chemistry, materials science, optics, and electronics spanning the range from fundamental concept to technology development and implementation.

Her research interests include the chemistry, properties, and applications of materials technologies for electronic and

photonic applications, with particular focus on polymeric and nanostructured materials for advanced technologies.

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alumni spotlight Jim Tucker Survived Bomb Disposal Duties in World War II, Building Successful Career in Pulp and Paper After he interrupted his studies at Georgia Tech to serve in World War II, Jim Tucker (ChE 1947-Coop) opted to train in the U.S. Army’s bomb disposal program, learning the design of German, Japanese, Allied, and U.S. bomb fuses, and how to identify them by touch.

“My choice of bomb disposal was based on several factors, the primary one being a desire to save lives, not take them. I also had confidence in my abilities which included attention to detail. I had repaired clocks and other mechanical devices since I was 10.”

sponsible for disposing of all remaining explosives on the heavily fortified peninsular on the ocean side of Tokyo Bay. After completing this assignment in the spring of 1946, Tucker was assigned as Executive Officer of the 724th Ordnance Maintenance Company and charged with moving the 24th Infantry Division from Yokohama, Japan, to an arsenal near Fukuoka on the southern island of Kyushu.

“Our train passed CO-OP BOYS directly through Today, at 95, Tucker is one of Hiroshima, so I witnessed two surviving members of the “Coop Boys,” a group of his classmates the destruction the atomic “My choice of bomb disposal was based bombs had caused there in metro Atlanta who were called on several factors, the primary one being a and in Nagasaki, which I desire to save lives, not take them.” for duty after enrolling at Tech in also visited.”

1939 and 1940. Tucker and fellow Soon after, he returned domestic and international projects. alumnus/veteran James Ivey still to the U.S. in July 1946 to resume He spent 15 years as a principal at meet for lunch every other month. his studies. Tucker had initially en- Simons-Eastern Consultants, first as Tucker knew he’d be called rolled at Tech in 1940 after graduat- vice president and chief engineer for for duty as soon as the Japanese ing from high school in Brunswick, 11 years and then as vice president bombed Pearl Harbor during his sophomore year. When he selected Georgia, and securing a co-op posi- for strategic planning and other spetion with Brunswick Pulp & Paper. cial services before retiring in 1991. the bomb disposal specialty after He was an internationally recogentering active duty in April 1943, nized authority on pulp and paper PULP & PAPER CAREER he learned it had a saying – “You processes, engineering techniques, go up fast!” – with a double meanAfter graduating from Tech in ing: Your military career could blow 1947, he began his career as a proj- and engineering management. For his years of service, he received the up with promotions, or you could ect engineer for Buckeye Cellulose from mistakes. The bomb-disposal Corporation. He joined Gulf States Engineering Division Leadership and Service Award from the Techtechniques he learned had been Paper Company as chief engineer nical Association of the Pulp and developed by the British Royal at their pioneering Demopolis, Engineers, who lost 360 of the 400 Alabama, mill and was responsible Paper Industry in 1989.

Tucker and his late wife, Nina, men initially assigned to this trialfor the first closed loop computer had two children, and today his and-error project. controlled process (Kamyr continuTucker was promoted to 1st ous digester) in the paper industry. focus is on his grandchildren and his large shade garden of flowering Lieutenant in December 1944 and He entered the engineering Captain in January 1946 when he consulting field in 1963 with Brown shrubs and orchids. “Both children and plants require patience, a virtue was a member of the Occupation and Root, where he spent 13 years force. As a member of the Japan as a manager of pulp and paper en- in short supply in my earlier years,” Occupation force, Tucker was regineering and completed numerous he says.

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SCHOOL OF CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING, GEORGIA TECH

2018 CoE Alumni Awards Two graduates of the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering were honored at the Georgia Tech College of Engineering Alumni Awards in April 2018.

They are: • Robert “Bud” Moeller (Engineering Hall of Fame), BS ChE 1976, Partner, Booz Allen Hamilton and Accenture (retired).

• Ashley B. Hancock (Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni), BS ChE 1990, Co-founder & CFO, Intent Solutions.

The annual induction, held this year at the Four Seasons hotel, recognizes those who have set themselves apart through an impact on the Institute, the engineering profession, or society at large.

Ashley B. Hancock and his wife, Elizabeth, CS 1996

Robert “Bud” Moeller (center) with featured speaker Gen. Philip Breedlove, BCE 1977, and College of Engineering Dean Steve McLaughlin

alumni news & updates Carlos Barroso, ChE 1980, is a new trustee of the Georgia Tech Alumni Association. He is senior vice president for global research and development at Campbell Soup Co.

Brian N. Brogdon, ChE 1992, has been named a TAPPI Fellow. TAPPI is the leading association for the worldwide pulp, paper, packaging, tissue, and converting industries.

Karissa F. Blyth, ChBE 2010, has been selected to take part in the Hispanic National Bar Association’s 2017 Latina Leadership Academy. She is an associate at Eversheds Sutherland, where she advises clients across a variety of industries.

Won Min Park, PhD 2015, joined the faculty of Kansas State University in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

He was previously a postdoc in Bioengineering and Biology at MIT.

John Flake, PhD 1998, was named chair of the Gordon and Mary Cain Department of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University after having served as interim chair for two years.

Richard Jackson, ChE 1980, was awarded the 2018 Engineer of the Year award from the Richmond Joint Engineers Council.

Apoorv Sinha, CHBE 2010, was named a fellow of Your Energy Future, a Canadian policy and leadership development program. Sinha is one of 16 participants travelling around Canada to learn about the diversity of the country’s energy sector and the implications of the global transition toward clean energy sources.

Eileen Webb, ChE 1984, was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Entrepreneurs Assembly in Reno, for

her business Accreditation Preparation, LLC, which provides ABET accreditation preparation consulting services to universities globally.

Sheng-Sheng Yu, PhD 2017, joined the chemical engineering faculty at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan in August 2018.

Please send your alumni news to news@chbe.gatech.edu.

Giving Opportunities To inquire about making a gift in support of the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, contact: Donna Peyton Director of Development 404-894-0987 give@chbe.gatech.edu

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Salmon Wins Fulbright Award to Conduct Heart Research Mandy Salmon, ChBE 2018, is researching an alternative treatment for a common heart arrhythmia called atrial fibrillation at Aarhus University in Denmark after receiving a Fulbright Program award.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program, designed to increase mutual understanding between residents of the United States and people of other countries.

Salmon, who plans to attend medical school after her time in Denmark from August 2018 to June 2019, says she was drawn to medicine after working for a year as a research assistant in Professor Ajit Yoganathan’s Cardiovascular Fluid Mechanics Laboratory, where she built three-dimensional models of the heart.

“Doing cardiovascular research during my senior year taught me that you can apply chemical engineering to the body by running computational flow dynamic simulations, to get the pressures and velocities of blood as it flows through different parts of the heart,” she says.

While she held internships at The Dennis Group, which builds commercial-food facilities, and at ExxonMobil, working on projects to improve light oils refinery operations, Salmon ultimately decided on medicine. “I like helping people more directly. Volunteering at hospitals led me to choose medicine.”

Salmon, who’s won acceptance to the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, was a member of the Georgia Tech Chapter of the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children, a global group that raises money for medically

“Doing cardiovascular research during my senior year taught me that you can apply chemical engineering to the body....”

underserved communities around the globe.

She traveled to Peru with the group during her sophomore year, and as a senior, she served as the director of fundraising to help pay for medical supplies for a community in Costa Rica.

2018 Air Products Symposium Winners ChBE undergrads presented their research on April 20 in the 2018 Air Products ChBE Undergraduate Research Symposium.

The winners were: • Trent Weiss, first place • Guillermo Bacardi, second place • Samuel Hays, third place • Nicholas Doss, honorable mention • Alec Hendrix, honorable mention.

Sponsored by Air Products, the symposium is designed to provide ChBE undergraduates who participate in research with the opportunity to present their work in a public forum.

More than 60 percent of ChBE undergrads participate in research.

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SCHOOL OF CHEMICAL & BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING, GEORGIA TECH

Select Graduate Honors ChBE recognized students for their achievements at the annual Student Honors Luncheon on April 11.

Select graduate honors include: • Exemplary Academic Achievement - Brandon Bout, Seyed Amirhossein Hejri Bidgoli, Maxim Bukhovko, Francesco Costantini, Ezgi Dogan Guner, Youngeun Kim, Tatyana Kiryutina, Long Nguyen, Omotola Okesanjo, and Daniel Shade.

• AIChE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant - Anshul Dhankher • Outstanding Performance on the Qualifying Exam - Jonathan Grunewald • Outstanding PhD Thesis - Melinda Jue • Outstanding MS Thesis - Tausif Salim • Outstanding PhD Proposal - Akshay Korde​ • Shell Outstanding Teaching Assistants - Kirthana Bhat, Anshul Dhanker, Zhengyuan Fang, Thomas Groseclose, and Kelvin Smith • Teamwork Awards - Maxim Bukhovko, Anshul Dhankher, Justin Lee, Juan Luis Mena Lepaix, Maggie Manspeaker, Krysten Minnici, Samantha Pustulka, and Conrad Roos (pictured below).

Ziegler Award Winners Krishna Jayachandrababu and Alexandra Tsoras presented their Waldemar T. Ziegler Award-winning work in a special edition of the ChBE Seminar Series.

Jayachandrababu (pictured right) won the Ziegler Award for Best Publication for “Structural and Mechanical Differences in Mixed-Linker Zeolitic Imidazolate Framework Synthesis by Solvent Assisted Exchange and de Novo Routes.”

Tsoras (pictured left of Professor Carson Meredith) won the Ziegler Award for Best PhD Proposal for “Peptide Nanoclusters for Increased Immunogenicity in Vaccines.”

30th Annual Graduate Symposium Winners

Select Undergraduate Honors For the 2017-2018 academic year, ChBE honored the following students: • AIChE Outstanding Senior Award - Jerel Jallorina • AIChE Outstanding Sophomore Award Kathryn Kicklighter • AIChE Outstanding Undergraduate Course Assistant Award - Rohan Kadambi • Chair’s Award—Outstanding ChBE Junior Osama Mohammad Ghani • Chair’s Award—Outstanding ChBE Senior Hayley Tsuchiyama • ChBE Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Jingwei Xie.

Congratulations to the winners of the 30th Graduate Research Symposium, held Feb. 22-23.

They include: Oral Presentations • Jayraj Joshi - first place • Juan Manuel Restrepo Flórez - second place • Thomas Kwok - third place Poster Presentations • Chinmay Satam - first place • Souryadeep Battacharyya and Nathan Ellebracht - second place (tie)

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