Chemical Engineering Faculty Highlighted in Faculty Colloquium Series
The College of Engineering hosts a Celebration of Faculty Careers Colloquium to recognize and celebrate the accomplishments of faculty within the college. Several faculty members from the School of Chemical Engineering have been featured during the colloquium.
April 21, 2015
Title: "Stability of Dispersions of Colloidal Particles Against Agglomeration and Sedimentation: Science and Applications"
Professor Franses has been at Purdue since 1979. He has published about 130 papers in refereed journals and several more in refereed books. He has mentored about 25 Ph. D. students, and many undergraduate research participants. He was an editor of the Journal Colloids and Surfaces, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science. He has taught Thermodynamics, Colloidal and Interfacial Phenomena, Unit Operations Laboratory, Reaction Engineering, and several other subjects to hundreds of graduate students and thousands of undergraduate students. In 2014 he published an undergraduate textbook on Thermodynamics with Chemical Engineering Applications.
March 31, 2015
Title: Polymer Mechanics and Other Non-Traditional Academic Pursuits
Dr. James Caruthers, the Gerald and Sarah Skidmore Professor of Chemical Engineering, has been on the faculty at Purdue since 1977. In addition to the traditional research and teaching activities, Caruthers also leads major activities in P-12 STEM education and the development of an on-line Chemical Engineering curriculum. The STEM activities are particularly interesting in that they involve the motorsports industry, including the organization of an international electric go-kart design and race competition each May at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway as part of the Indy500.
January 22, 2015
Title: Engineering Education: Personal Reminisces on Where It Has Been and Where It is Going
Phillip C. Wankat is the Clifton L. Lovell Distinguished Professor with appointments in Chemical Engineering and in Engineering Education. He earned his BSChE from Purdue, his PhD in chemical engineering from Princeton University and a MSEd in Counseling from Purdue. His technical research is in separation processes, mainly in the areas of adsorption, chromatography, and distillation. He has published two separation textbooks – Separation Process Engineering, 3rd edition 2012 (Prentice-Hall) and Rate-Controlled Separations (Springer). He is also author of the monograph Large Scale Adsorption and Chromatography, CRC Press, 1986 (available free from Knovel)
April 8, 2014
Title: Fundamental Advances and Applications of Chromatography
Dr. Nien-Hwa Linda Wang has been a professor of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University since 1980. She received her PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1978. She is internationally known for her research contributions in mass transfer, adsorption, multi-component chromatography, and simulated moving beds. The results were described in more than 120 journal articles, six book chapters, two patents, and two current patent applications. She has given more than 100 invited lectures and more than 200 presentations in national and international meetings. She has developed several new chromatography and simulated moving bed technologies that are applicable to the design of a wide range of adsorption and chromatography processes.
April 29, 2014
Title: Kinetics of Heterogeneous Catalytic Reactions
Fabio H. Ribeiro is currently the R. Norris and Eleanor Shreve Professor of Chemical Engineering at the School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1989, worked for Catalytica, Inc. in Mountain View, California, held a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California – Berkeley, and was on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute faculty before joining Purdue University in August 2003. His research interests are centered on the kinetics of heterogeneous catalytic reactions and catalyst characterization under reaction conditions. He has over 100 publications in scholarly journals. He was Chair for the American Institute of Chemical Engineer’s Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Division (2010) and is editor for Journal of Catalysis. His honors include the NSF CAREER award (1997-2002), the Excellence in Catalysis Award from the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York (2005), designation as a Purdue University Faculty Scholar (2006-10) and the Henry J. Albert Award from the International Precious Metals Institute (2012).
November 3, 2014
Title: A Life's Work in Academia - A Labor of Love
R. Byron Pipes was appointed John L. Bray Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Purdue University in 2004. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1987) and the Royal Society of Engineering Sciences of Sweden (1995). He served as Goodyear Endowed Professor of Polymer Engineering at the University of Akron during 2001-04. He was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the College of William and Mary during 1999-2001, where he pursued research at the NASA Langley Research Center in the field of carbon nanotechnology.
March 29, 2013
Title: Knowledge Acquisition Frameworks and Deliberate Innovation - Perspectives from and Next Steps for a Journey in Engineering Complexity
Dr. Pekny is a Professor of Chemical Engineering with research interests in supply chain management, planning and scheduling systems, process design and analysis, model-based process improvement, agent-based modeling, and real-time decision systems. Over the last twenty years his group has developed a new type of applied mathematics and problem solving approach to address complexity involving the time line. These models are particularly useful in serving as a knowledge acquisition framework to understand large amounts of process data, identify data needing to be collected, and to achieve strategic goals. Professor Pekny believes in utilizing the academic culture to accomplish objectives which are impossible without a long term, fundamental focus, and close collaboration with practitioners.
A complete listing of faculty recognized during the colloquium is available at https://engineering.purdue.edu/Engr/AboutUs/Administration/AcademicAffairs/Events/faculty-colloquiums/alpha-listing. Faculty members must have reached full professor status to qualify.