FACULTY
Faculty Highlights ROBERTS PROMOTED, LEADS NEW BIOTECHNOLOGY INITIATIVES CHRISTOPHER ROBERTS, whose research focuses on the quantitative prediction, design and control of protein degradation in solution, and of degradation of pharmaceutical and bio-pharmaceutical molecules in amorphous solids (glasses), has been promoted to professor. The research in his group has long been distinctive for being steeped in the fundamentals but being of great interest to colleagues in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries. This characteristic is shared by the research of a significant fraction of the faculty in the department with research interests in bioengineering, which has grown enormously over the past decade with new faculty hires at both senior and junior levels. The department’s newfound great strength in this area led to the emergence in the past year of multiple new structures, under Roberts’s leadership, that reflect the collaborative research and shared resources and facilities to cement the leadership of UD, especially the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, in this critical area for research and societal impact. The Center for Biomanufacturing Science & Technology (CBST) brings together faculty that tackle a wide array of problems and fundamental challenges in areas including: cell culture processes and bioreactors; high-end and scalable purification processes; product formulation and stability; drug delivery; manufacturing; and analytical technologies, instrumentation, and algorithms to support all of these areas. The Center supports cutting-edge research facilities on campus, educational activities including seminars, workshops, and short courses, as well as
8 | CHEMICAL AND BIOMOLECULAR ENGINEERING
PRASAD DHURJATI, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, is now president-elect of the University of Delaware Faculty Senate for the 2015–16 academic year. Dhurjati’s expertise is in biotechnology and artificial intelligence, with research in the area of systems biology, systems medicine and modeling of engineering systems. He also applies mathematical models and knowledgebased approaches to convert biological and medical data to useful knowledge. n
industrial research consortia. Participating faculty from the department are: MACIEK ANTONIEWICZ, associate professor; WILFRED CHEN, Gore Professor; DAVID COLBY, assistant professor; PRASAD DHURJATI, professor; ERIC FURST, professor; APRIL KLOXIN, assistant professor; CHRISTOPHER KLOXIN, assistant professor; KELVIN LEE, Gore Professor and director, Delaware Biotechnology Institute; ABRAHAM LENHOFF, Allan P. Colburn Professor; TUNDE OGUNNAIKE, William L. Friend Chair; TERRY PAPOUTSAKIS, Eugene DuPont chair; MILLIE SULLIVAN, associate professor; NORMAN WAGNER, Robert L. Pigford Chair. Roberts also directs the Biomolecular Interaction Technologies Center (BITC), which has been operated at the University of New Hampshire for some years but is moving to a new home at UD. The center is an academic-industrial consortium that provides advanced research capabilities as well as being a forum for technology transfer and support of innovative research in the area. n
THOMAS H. EPPS III, Thomas & Kipp Gutshall Professor of Chemical Engineering, associate professor, joint professor, Materials Science & Engineering and DuPont Young Professor, was selected to attend the 2014 US-Japan Frontiers of Science Symposium in Tokyo, Japan. The symposium was cosponsored by the National Academy of Sciences at the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences. n
ERIC FURST, professor and director, Center for Molecular & Engineering Thermodynamics (CMET), was awarded the 2014 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal. n
E. TERRY PAPOUTSAKIS, the Eugene du Pont Chair of Chemical Engineering, was elected a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). His research focuses on areas of systems biology, metabolic engineering, experimental and computational genomics with applications in stem-cell biology and prokaryotic biology for the production of biofuels and chemicals from biomass. n