Dear colleagues, students, alumni and friends:
This has been an exciting year for the department and I would like to take a moment in this holiday season to reflect on our successes.
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS | One of the highest honors for a Husky is to be tapped by the Governor of the State of Washington to sit on the Board of Regents — the 10 persons UW governing body. In May, Austin Wright-Pettibone received that call and became the first-ever engineering student to serve as a regent. Four ChemEs were inducted into the inaugural class of Husky100, an award that recognizes undergraduate and graduate students for their leadership, excellence and desire to make the most of their time at UW. Thao Nguyen became the fourth ChemE in 6 years to win the College of Engineering Dean’s Medal for Academic Excellence. Our undergraduates shone at the Pacific Northwest AIChE Student Conference organized in Seattle by Prof. Berg and the ChemE car team mentored by Prof. Adler took second place in poster competition at the AIChE meeting in San Francisco. Meanwhile, our graduate students won national awards from NSF, ACS and ECS and our entrepreneurial design teams took top honors at several business competitions. Three startups were born of these projects: Ionic Windows which develops silica based proton-conducting membranes for flow batteries (Pozzo lab), Coulomb Sea which offers smart charging strategies to improve battery health while reducing waste (Profs. Subramanian and Schwartz), and Decaf Style, an undergraduate only team advised by Prof. Pozzo which has perfected a tea bag like technology to rapidly decaffeinate coffee and other beverages. Women in Chemical Engineering (WChE), an organization created by Prof. Nance to educate and empower women in chemical engineering celebrated a hugely successful first year and our students channeled their creativity into art at the first Science & Engineering as Art competition.
FACULTY HONORS AND RECOGNITION | Together, ChemE has grown to 26 core faculty and a record 14 professors holding endowed positions. The year kicked off with Thomson Reuters’ selection of Profs. Jenekhe and Cao as two of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds, and Diverse magazine’s naming Prof. Carothers as one of 12 emerging scholars in all fields of academia. We celebrated Prof. DeForest’s win of the prestigious 2016 UW Distinguished Teaching Award, and Prof. Schwartz for the Landolt Distinguished Mentor Award. Nature Biotechnology named Prof. Jiang’s 2013 paper as one of eight "major hits" in its 20-year history of biomedical research, Prof. Subramanian presented at a Washington D.C. congressional showcase, and the U.S. Secretary of Energy visited Prof. Hillhouse’s lab for their innovations on photovoltaic materials and solution processed solar cells. Prof. Pfaendtner won a $3M National Science Foundation Research NRT award to establish a trailblazing graduate training program in data science for clean energy, and Prof. Schwarz and I were honored to be elected to the Washington State Academy of Science. Last but not least, and thanks to the generosity of Jeet and Jan Bindra and of the Weyerhaeuser Company, we recognized not one, but two outstanding faculty, Profs. Pfaendtner and Pozzo, with professorships.
SIGNATURE INITIATIVES | As featured in the Fall issue of Catalyst, our new sustainability initiative which exposes students to non-intuitive problems, life cycle inventory and the influence of the boundaries of the box is being rolled out in the undergraduate curriculum. We are in the process of implementing a comprehensive communication strategy inclusive of print, electronic and social media to boost our reach, and we continue to build shared infrastructure in Benson Hall to improve the student experience, enable innovative teaching, and catalyze research synergies and collaborations. With growth in our undergraduate and graduate student populations, and a larger faculty with exceptional research strengths, we have kicked off a strategic planning effort to take the department to the next level of excellence. Our vision — knowledge and solutions for a changing world — is also our tagline. I look forward to help bring it to fruition.
Best wishes for a wonderful holiday season.
François Baneyx
Department Chair and Charles W.H. Matthaei Professor