A bountiful year for ChE faculty and students

Besides the 100th anniversary of the founding of their program at Lehigh, faculty and students in the department of chemical engineering are celebrating a year marked by a large number of awards and achievements.

The highlights include:

John Chen, the Carl R. Anderson Professor of chemical engineering, last year became only the fourth chemical engineer in 40 years to receive the Max Jakob Memorial Award, the top international prize for achievements in heat transfer.

Chen also received the Classic Paper Award from the Heat Transfer Division of ASME (the American Society of Mechanical Engineers) International for "Correlation for Boiling Heat Transfer to Saturated Fluids in Convective Flow," an article he wrote that was published in 1966 in the journal Industrial and Engineering Process Design and Development, now known as I&EC Research.

Mohamed S. El-Aasser, dean of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science and Iacocca Professor of chemical engineering, received the Roy W. Tess Award in Coatings from the American Chemical Society's Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering. El-Aasser, who was cited for seminal research in emulsion polymerization, has pioneered the use of mini-emulsions in the living-free-radical polymerization of styrene, which allowed narrow molecular weight distribution polymers to be prepared for the first time ever in colloidal form.

Mayuresh Kothare, P.C. Rossin Associate Professor of chemical engineering and co-director of the Chemical Process Modeling and Control Research Center, was appointed associate editor for 2004 of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, widely recognized as the most prestigious journal on automatic control published by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Control Systems Society. Kothare is one of two chemical engineers on an editorial board traditionally dominated by electrical engineers. In 2002, Kothare received the Alfred Noble Robinson Award for promoting the interests of the university.

William Luyben, professor of chemical engineering and co-director of the Chemical Process Modeling and Control Center, will receive the Computing Practice Award of the Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). CAST will present the award at AIChE's annual meeting in November in San Francisco. The award honors "outstanding contributions in the practice or application of computing and systems technology to chemical engineering."

William Schiesser, the R. L. McAnn Professor of Engineering and Mathematics, has been selected to receive an honorary Doctor of Engineering from Polytechnique de Mons, Belgium, in September 2004. Polytechnique de Mons awards only one honorary degree annually, and presents all the degrees once every five years. Schiesser is the only is the only American among the five among the 2004 recipients, the other four being from Europe. Schiesser was cited in the 2003 edition of Who's Who in America in recognition of his lifetime of accomplishments.

Leslie Sperling, professor emeritus of chemical engineering and one of the world's top researchers in the field of polymer science, delivered the plenary address at the Fifth National Graduate Research Polymer Conference, held in June at Lehigh. The conference, which was sponsored by the Polymer Chemistry Division of the American Chemistry Society, was dedicated to Sperling, who retired last year after 35 years of service to Lehigh. In 2002, Sperling was elected a fellow of ACS's Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering.

Harvey Stenger, professor of chemical engineering and former dean of the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science, received the university's 2003 Hillman Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising. The award was the sixth university- or college-wide honor Stenger has received since joining the faculty in 1984. In 2002, Stenger received the Stabler Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Deming Lewis Award from the tenth-year class.

Israel Wachs, the G. Whitney Snyder Professor of chemical engineering, has been chosen to receive two top honors - the Award for Industrial Innovation from the American Chemical Society's Southeast Region, and the Industrial Practice Catalysis and Reaction Engineering Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Wachs will receive the awards at the ACS Southeast Regional Meeting in November in Atlanta and at AIChE's annual meeting in San Francisco, also in November.

The awards are being given in part for a catalytic process Wachs invented that converts waste gases from paper pulp mills into formaldehyde and other valuable chemicals. For his work in that area, which culminated in a collaboration with Georgia-Pacific Corp., Wachs received the 2002 Clean Air Technology Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA award was given to Lehigh, Georgia-Pacific and Gibson Technologies Inc. Sukwon Choi, a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering, and Andrew Gibson '52, former process-improvement manager at Georgia-Pacific and now owner of Gibson Technologies, were also recognized.

Alexander Verdooren received the Graduate Student Leadership Award, while Ashish Pattekar received a certificate for honorable mention. Both are Ph.D. candidates in chemical engineering. The award is given by the Graduate Alumni Committee to honor "a graduate student in good standing who by exemplary scholarship, leadership and service to the university and graduate student committee, represents the highest traditions of Lehigh University."