Student Accomplishments

   The Student Chapter of AIChE at Arizona State recently sent 7 students to attend the Regional Student Conference at New Mexico Tech (Socorro, NM).  The conference began on the evening of Friday, March 7, with a reception and ended on Sunday, March 9 with a tour of the Very Large Array for Radioastronomy, which is just outside Socorro, NM.  The main events and competitions for the conference were held on Saturday when 140 students from 8 schools in the Rocky Mountain Region joined together.  The day began with teams of students from each school presenting the ChemE cars they had designed for the ChemE car competition.  The cars are roughly the size of a shoe box and are powered by a chemical reaction.  Designs presented included pressure vessels, hand-made batteries, fuel cells, and ASU's own Peltier thermoelectric device.  Later in the day, the cars competed to determine which car could travel as close as possible to 76' 8" in 2 minutes.

Unfortunately, the ASU team-car was a little slow and was only able to travel 7 ft in 2 minutes, but this was still good enough for 4th place (a few cars never moved an inch).  The ASU car was also awarded SECOND place in the poster competition and FIRST place for most creative design.  The other major academic competition was for research paper presentations, where 8 students presented original research they had conducted during the past year.  In this competition, ASU's own Rebecca Glaspie finished third, receiving a $50 prize.  There was one additional non-academic competition -- a dodgeball tournament, which was won by a hard-throwing team from BYU.  In summary, this marks the second straight year that ASU has had a research presentation in the top 3, and our ChemE car continues to improve every year, so we are very excited about next year, which will be hosted by Colorado State University.

The students attending the conference were Susan Kubinski, Rebecca Glaspie, Krishna Mukkavilli, Brent Server, Chris Wanamaker, Benjamin Bermudez, and Bryan Sexton along with the faculty advisor, Dr. Heys. 

Below are photos of the conference attendees, including Dr. Heys (pictured in photo at right):

   Congratulations to our Spring 2007 graduates! This spring, the Department graduated 21 bachelor of science candidates, one master of science candidate, and three doctoral candidates. The graduates are listed below:

• Bachelor's: Dustin Allen, Renae Bellah, Hillary Brennan, Byron Currier, Michael Dorr, Josh Gemmell,
• Arun Ghmire, Troy Gustaveson, Hank Hamblin, Thomas Heaton, Jeanne Jensen, Brandon Knott,
• Andrew Lauer, Peter Martin, Ralph Munoz, Brian Parkey, Shaun Russell, Steven Sears, Amber
• Summers, David Valdez, Sam Villalobos
• Master's: Deepak Singh
• Doctoral: Charity Coury, Corey Tyree, Qinghua Yin

The photo below shows several of our bachelor's candidates posing at the Engineering Convocation.

Front Row: Byron Currier, Jeanne Jensen, Renae Bellah, Ralph Munoz

Back Row: Peter Martin, Hank Hamblin, Thomas Heaton, Troy Gustaveson, Amber Summers, Brandon Knott, Sam Villalobos, David Valdez, Andrew Lauer, Josh Gemmell, Michael Dorr

• Department hosts annual Celebration of Excellence program -- On April 13, the Department of Chemical Engineering held its annual Celebration of Excellence awards program. Located in ASU's University Club, the program drew award recipients, family members, donors, and ChE faculty and staff. Dr. Jerry Lin, ChE Department Chair, and Mike Sever, Undergraduate ChE Advising Coordinator, served as Masters of Ceremony for the Event. Dr. Paul Johnson, Executive Dean for the Fulton School, also addressed the attendees. Award recipients, who included both undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering students, were recognized for excellence in academics, teaching, and research endeavors, among other areas. Please view the list of recipients.
• Jessica O'Brien Receives Travel Award from North American Membrane Society
  Jessica O'Brien, a first year Ph.D. student working in Dr. Lin's group, was selected to receive a North American Membrane Society (NAMS) Travel Award of $1000 to cover travel expenses to the 2006 NANM Annual Meeting in Chicago in May 17-22, 2006. Jessica attended the NAMS meeting, and presented a paper "Separation of Xylene Isomers by Pervaporation through MFI-zeolite Membranes of Varying Microstructure". NAMS is an scientific society that serves the synthetic membrane community by fostering the development and dissemination of knowledge in membrane science and technology, and by promoting the collaborative efforts of researchers, technologists and end-users.
• Third-year Ph.D. student Jay Schwartz has received "Best Presentation in Session" awards for papers presented at the last two American Control Conferences (the 2005 ACC in Portland, Oregon and the 2006 ACC in Minneapolis, MN).
• Fifth-year Ph.D. student (now Ph.D. graduate) Hyunjin Lee was a leading author in a paper at the 2005 AIChE Annual Meeting in Cincinnati that received Honorable Mention in the Computing and Systems Technology (CAST) Director's Award Competition.