News: CBE

Prof. DeLisa has been selected by the Emmanuel Giannelis (VPR) to serve as the next Director of the Institute of Biotechnology. The Institute has played a central role in the biosciences and bioengineering at the Cornell for several decades. It is the home of the Biotechnology Resource Center and the long running Center for Advanced Technology grant from NYS. For more about the Institute of Biotechnology, please visit: http://www.biotech.cornell.edu/. Read more

Shuler, as recipient of the 2019 Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication, will be recognized at the November AIChE Meeting in Orlando, Florida. The Biotechnology Progress Award for Excellence in Biological Engineering Publication recognizes outstanding contributions to the literature in biomedical engineering, biological engineering, biotechnology, biochemical engineering and related fields. The award, which is presented annually at the AIChE Annual Meeting, celebrates excellence and foundational contributions to biotechnology and biological... Read more

The Discovery Space program at Imperial College in London does. This summer, in a fast-paced and immersive environment, undergraduate chemical engineers from Cornell applied classroom theory to real-life objectives over the course of five weeks. Feifei Hu ’21 was one of the 21 chemical engineering students from Cornell who participated in the program. From her mentor, Dr. Colin Hale, she learned about the role that chemical engineers can play in finding climate change solutions. Read more

The team will be led by Peng Chen, the Peter J.W. Debye Professor of Chemistry in the College of Arts and Sciences, who is collaborating with Tobias Hanrath, professor at the Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Buz Barstow, Ph.D. ’09, assistant professor of biological and environmental engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The Cornell project was one of six selected by the DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research to explore microscopic imaging of plants and microbes as a way to advance bioenergy research. Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded an interdisciplinary team of Cornell researchers $2 million to study the combination of inorganic semiconductor nanoparticles and bacterial cells for more efficient bioenergy conversion. Read more

The seventh Arab-American Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine symposium, held in partnership with the Library of Alexandria and Academy of Scientific Research and Technology (ASRT), will be hosted in Cairo, Egypt in November 2019. This year, hundreds of outstanding applications were received from the Arab region and the United States with only a small fraction of the applicants invited to participate. For more information the symposium visit: https://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/dsc/AAFrontiers/index.htm For more information on the You Group visit: http://peese.org/ Read more

Joseph Le Doux is associate chair for undergraduate studies and an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. He joined the department in 1999 as an assistant professor because he was inspired by the vision of the department’s founding chair, Don Giddens, to educate engineers who were integrative thinkers who could operate seamlessly between the engineering and life sciences. As part of his contribution to the department’s efforts to realize this vision, Dr. Le Doux invented the problem-solving studio approach for... Read more

Prof. Geoff Coates and his collaborators including Prof. Chris Alabi (CBE), consequently developed a multiblock polymer – Coates jokingly refers to it as “magic pixie dust” – that binds polyethylene to polypropylene so they can be recycled together. He and his team are also aiming to design a plastic that behaves like polyethylene, so if such packaging does make its way into the ocean, it will degrade back to carbon dioxide and water rather than drift around for hundreds of years. Read more

For Christian Nowak, the knowledge of objective permanence provided by the natural sciences sparked a life-long affinity for the subject. “English was my second language while growing up, which meant that I’d occasionally have difficulty interpreting certain linguistic idiosyncrasies or explaining concepts relating to the social sciences,” says Nowak. “With the physical sciences and mathematics, however, misinterpretation was never an issue, because the fundamentals never change. Two plus two will always equal four, and I find myself drawn to this objective understanding of our world,” Nowak... Read more

Fengqi You,the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering, is senior author of “ Robust Model Predictive Control of Irrigation Systems With Active Uncertainty Learning and Data Analytics,” which published online in May in IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology. The paper was co-authored with Abraham Stroock ’95, the Gordon L. Dibble ’50 Professor and William C. Hooey Director of the Smith School, who is working on water conservation strategies with apple farmers in New York state and almond, apple and grape growers in drought-ridden regions of the West Coast... Read more