News Highlights

(Editor's note: Wise was just named the 2016 Distinguished Senior for Chemical & Biological Engineering) Senior Clare Wise is accustomed to making fresh tracks. Wise, a chemical and biological engineering major from Wenatchee, Wash., competes in slalom and giant slalom events for the University of Colorado ski team. In October,...

CU Boulder alumnus Mike McAtee wasn’t particularly interested in science as a high school student at Columbine High School. In fact, he reluctantly enrolled in chemistry his junior year only because he knew his preferred colleges would expect science courses on his transcript. More than 30 years later, McAtee credits...

ChBE Professor Christine Hrenya and co-PI Thomas Hauser of research computing received an 18-month award of $686K from the Department of Energy for “AOI [4B] MFIX DEM Enhancement for Industry-Relevant Flows.”

PhD candidate Keesha Erickson won a competitive 2016 Dean’s Graduate Student Research Grant Award for her proposal, “Discovery of novel drug targets for eradication of multi-drug resistant infectious pathogens.” Dean’s Awards are sponsored by the Graduate School and support the research, scholarship and creative work of graduate students from all...

The winner of the Genentech Outstanding Student Award is CBEN junior Jace Blackburn . This annual award recognizes one CU chemical and biological engineering student and includes both $2500 and a summer internship at Genentech’s San Francisco location. As a student research assistant in CU Denver’s Department of Neurology, Blackburn...

Professor Christine Hrenya has been appointed an Associate Editor of the AIChE Journal . This high-impact, peer-reviewed monthly journal covers groundbreaking research in nine chemical engineering and related fields. Hrenya brings with her experience from her 3 years (2013-2015) as an editor for Aerosol Science and Technology . Her new...

In nature, sequence controls function; differences between you and another person – or organism – primarily arise not from different average DNA compositions, but from different DNA sequences. Professor Chris Bowman and his colleagues are seeking to make synthetic polymers with this same capacity, where the sequence itself dictates the...

Vanessa Witte was awarded 3rd place in the 2015 Undergraduate Student Poster Competition at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City last week. Her poster was titled, “Hydrogen Fuel Production Using Reactive Metal Oxides in a Solar Thermal Water Splitting (STWS) Cycle.” A researcher in the Weimer group, Witte...

PhD student Tariq Jamil received a travel grant from the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) to present multiple talks at the fall 2015 Materials Science & Technology (MS&T) conference in Columbus, Ohio. At the conference, Jamil spoke on the “Mechanism of Molecular Interaction of Superplasticizer Oligomers with Hydrated Cement...

As recognition of his transformational contributions to the production of renewable/ sustainable hydrogen by splitting water using concentrated sunlight, Professor Al Weimer was given the 2015 AIChE Research Excellence in Sustainable Engineering Award . This award is presented annually to a sustainability leader who has made significant technical contributions relative...