Medlin

Professor Will Medlin, department chair of chemical and biological engineering, received a four-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation award to study new routes for converting biomass into renewable fuels and chemicals.

With the spring semester ending soon, I am grateful for our students, faculty and staff who helped make our return to campus this past academic year a success. All throughout the fall and spring, we found success and fellowship in our classrooms and research labs, returning to safe and productive in-person experiences that we will never take for granted again.

CU Boulder’s East Campus is now home to the High-Sensitivity Low-Energy Ion Scattering (HS-LEIS) Spectrometer, a tool researchers from across the Rocky Mountain region will use for advanced materials characterization and analysis.

We had a good fall semester. That seems like a simple statement, but it means a lot, considering the events of the past year and a half. It is worth remarking upon as CU Boulder returned to full-time, on-campus operations.

Alumni and friends of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering generously made contributions to the department excellence fund in honor of Giving Tuesday. Nineteen donors provided $3,018 during the giving period, which ran throughout the latter half of November.

The proliferation of plastic products has created an environmental challenge: what should be done with unusable, discarded plastic waste that can harm the environment? Faculty from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering are working on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, Hydrogenolysis for Upcycling of Polyesters and Mixed Plastics, to address this serious environmental issue.