Wei-Shou Hu received two very prestigious awards at the recent American Institute of Chemical Engineers Annual Meeting in Nashville, TN. He was chosen for the Food, Pharmaceutical, and Bioengineering Division Award for his groundbreaking contributions in cell-culture engineering, genomics, liver-tissue engineering, and metabolic engineering. He was also presented with the Society for Biological Engineering Award for Excellence and Service for his work in founding the Consortium of CHO Cell Genomics.

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Eray Aydil was awarded the 2009 Plasma Prize of the AVS Plasma Science and Technology Division (PSTD) at the 56th International Symposium of the AVS in San Jose this week. The Plasma Prize is given each year to a researcher who has conducted outstanding research in science and technology of gas plasmas. It is the highest honour of the PSTD. Eray shared the award with Frank Chen, Professor Emeritus at the University of California Los Angeles. This was the first time, in the award’s history, that two researchers were selected to receive the plasma prize. Eray said that “sharing the award with Frank, whose seminal papers and books I read when I was a graduate student, makes it even more special.” Eray received the award for “pioneering work on the characterization of plasma species and their energy distributions in plasma assisted deposition and etching of materials.”

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The Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science said a final Good Bye to H. Ted Davis on October 17. The memorial function included an afternoon of talks and remembrances, and an evening dinner. Ted, who was the Head of CEMS for 15 years and the Dean of the Institute of Technology for 10 years, died of heart failure on May 17.

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The Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI) of NSF announced the award of 20 grants in FY 2009, including eight on the topic of Hydrocarbons from Biomass (HyBi). One of the 8 HyBi awards was given to a team of 3 CEMS faculty (Bhan, Schmidt and Tsapatsis) and collaborators from Princeton (Floudas) and the University of Delaware (Vlachos).

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Assistant Professor Kevin Dorfman was selected as one of the recipients of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Young Faculty Award for 2009. The goal of this program is to "identify and engage rising research stars in junior faculty positions in academia" and "provide high-impact funding to these rising stars early in their careers in order to develop their research ideas in the context of Department of Defense (DoD) needs." The award provides two years of funding to support Dorfman's research on nanofluidic methods for manipulating and analyzing DNA.

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The Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) chose Professor Yiannis Kaznessis as the 2009 Outstanding Young Researcher. This award recognizes an individual under the age of 40 for outstanding contributions to the literature of chemical engineering computing and systems technology. The award will be presented to Professor Kaznessis at the AIChE fall meeting in Nashville, TN.

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