Your generosity plays a critical role in our ability to fulfill our mission and is truly appreciated.| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Aug 15| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Chuqiao (Elise) Chen, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara, and her collaborators were awarded top honors at the 2025 Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) Principal Investigators’ Meeting, held in Washington, D.C. The team won the Student and Postdoc Team Science Competition, besting more than twenty other research groups from across the country.| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor James B. Rawlings has been named the recipient of the 2025 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, the highest recognition of professional achievement for U.S. control systems engineers and scientists. Presented by the American Automation Control Council, which is the U.S. national member organization of the International Federal of Automatic Control (IFAC), the award honors distinguished career contributions to the theory or application ...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Anika Jena, a rising fourth-year chemical engineering major at UC Santa Barbara, has earned an opportunity to present her work on powerful supramolecular biomaterials and nucleic acid nanotechnology at next month’s American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall Meeting in Washington, D.C. Jena was one of only ten undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral chemists nationwide selected to receive an Eli Lilly Travel Award from the ACS Women Chemists Committee (WCC) and Eli Lilly and Company. Aimed at in...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
The distinguished chemical engineer and materials scientist joined the UCSB faculty in 2014.| rss
A paper led by UCSB alumnus Michael C. Burroughs (PhD ’21) has won the 2025 Journal of Rheology Publication Award.| rss
The UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering’s 2025 Undergraduate Commencement is just days away for seniors. The ceremony will take place on Friday, June 13, at 1 PM on Commencement Green. Graduating senior Changxuan Yang will be part of a select group of students leading the class of 2025 into the ceremony as banner carriers.| rss
Each spring, the UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering (COE) bestows a handful of prestigious awards upon graduating seniors, who excelled both inside and outside of the classroom. Each recipient will be honored on stage during the college’s Undergraduate Commencement, which will take place at 1 PM on Commencement Green on Friday, June 13. | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Scientists at UC Santa Barbara and Northwestern University have created the first synthetic fragment of tau protein that acts like a prion. The “mini prion” folds and stacks into strands, or fibrils, of misfolded tau proteins, which then transmit their abnormally folded shape to other normal tau proteins. Misfolded, prion-like proteins drive the progression of tauopathies, a group of neurodegenerative diseases — including Alzheimer’s disease — characterized by the abnormal accumulat...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
We use molecular simulation and statistical mechanical theory to understand multi-scale, hierarchical interactions in complex soft materials and biomaterials. Our current foci include:| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
2022 Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
2025 Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage Award, American Automatic Control Council| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Mitsubishi Chemical Professor| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
For the 24th year in a row, the chemical engineering graduate program at UC Santa Barbara has ranked among the top ten public universities in U.S. News & World Report’s 2025 Best Graduate Engineering Schools report, which was released on April 8. The graduate school rankings were based entirely on peer surveys submitted by department heads at public and private universities across the country. The UCSB chemical engineering program ranked No. 9 among public universities and No. 14 overall ...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
2025 Vice Chancellor for Research, University of California, Santa Barbara| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Two UC Santa Barbara engineers are among the 129 new members worldwide elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 2021. Materials and chemistry professor Craig Hawker and Rachel Segalman, chair of the Chemical Engineering Department, join the 106 American and 23 foreign engineers honored this year. Election to the NAE is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Professor Rachel A. Segalman, Edward Noble Kramer Professor and Chemical Engineering Department Chair at UC Santa Barbara, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Just days after winning the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award, the Department of Energy’s highest honor for mid-career scientists, Rachel Segalman, professor and chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Chemical Department, has received one of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ (AIChE) most prestigious prizes, the Andreas Acrivos Award for Professional Progress in Chemical Engineering. The AIChE annually presents the Professional Progress Award in recognition of one researcher’s sustained i...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Rachel Segalman, professor and chair of UC Santa Barbara’s Chemical Engineering Department, recently received a memorable phone call. The caller identification on her cellular phone read “DOE,” standing for the Department of Energy, which piqued the interest and nerves of the Edward Noble Kramer Professor. | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the world’s largest organization for chemical engineering professionals, has awarded one of its most prestigious honors to UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor James B. Rawlings, selecting him for the 2025 John M. Prausnitz AIChE Institute Lecturer Award, an accolade given to a distinguished member who has made significant contributions to chemical engineering in their field of specialization. The selection committee highl...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor Rachel Segalman has received a distinguished honor within the scientific community by being elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a commendation bestowed upon less than 1 percent of AAAS members each year. She is among 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators who comprise the 2024 Class of AAAS Fellows. The association is the world’s largest general scientific society and publishes the Science ...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Associate Teaching Professor| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
2021-present Vice-President, International Mesostructured Materials Association| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
From helping students thrive in the classroom and in campus housing, to conducting undergraduate research at UCSB and at a national laboratory, Chandraki Chatterjee has remained extremely active while pursuing her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara. Recently, a committee in the Chemical Engineering Department selected the fourth-year senior as the 2025 recipient of the Amy Lutz Smiley Scholarship in recognition of her excellent academic performance and contributio...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Professor| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
University of California, Santa Barbara| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Few people have heard of the chemical ethylene oxide, but all of us have used products that rely on it for their production, from antifreeze and plastics to textiles and disinfectants. It is what’s known as a platform chemical — one that is the basis for many other chemicals — and it’s worth about $40 billion per year on the global market. But the ethylene oxide production process emits millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere annually, contributing to climate change, and the curre...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Chemical engineering faculty at UC Santa Barbara have awarded fifth-year PhD student Anukta Datta the department’s prestigious Schlinger Fellowship for Excellence in Chemical Engineering Research for the 2024-‘25 academic year. Established through a generous gift from Warren and Katharine Schlinger, the award recognizes a fourth- or fifth-year doctoral student in the department who has made outstanding progress in research projects, demonstrated by publications, submitted manuscripts, and...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Complex materials and chemical interfaces serve as the basis for nearly all modern technologies. Our faculty and research groups study how the synthesis, processing and properties of these systems can be used to engineer products and devices with well-controlled or novel performance for a variety of applications. A fundamental goal is usually to understand the interplay between molecular chemistry and multi-scale structure to design materials and interfaces, and the processes used to prepare...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
May 7| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Professor Scott Shell was named the 2017 recipient of the AIChE CoMSEF Impact Award. The Computational Molecular Science and Engineering Forum (CoMSEF) Impact Award recognizes outstanding research in computational molecular science and engineering, encompassing both methods and applications. | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Mentoring graduate students is an essential component of the mission of a research institution such as UC Santa Barbara. For faculty, mentoring involves training graduate students for careers in academia and industry and preparing them to meet the highest ethical and professional standards. Chemical engineering professor M. Scott Shell is one of three faculty members selected by UCSB’s Academic Senate to receive a 2021-‘22 Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award in recognition of exemplary cont...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor M. Scott Shell has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with nearly sixty thousand members from more than one hundred ten countries. The institute’s highest grade of membership, achieved only through election by the Board of Directors, recognizes Fellows for their significant professional accomplishments and contributions to en...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
The UC Santa Barbara Chemical Engineering Department recently honored Professor Michelle O’Malley for her pioneering research and appointment to the Cliff R. Scholle Endowed Chair with an inaugural lecture and investiture. The chair was established through a generous gift from Cliff R. Scholle, as a way to honor early leaders in the department: Professors Duncan A. Mellichamp, John E. Myers, Robert G. Rinker, and Orville C. Sandall, who had a profound influence on him and generations of stu...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
“Research without walls” isn’t just a phrase at UC Santa Barbara; it is the very foundation of the university’s academic endeavors. This is especially true within the College of Engineering, where new discoveries have been made and impactful technologies designed through interdisciplinary research. The college has long embraced a culture of collaboration and is home to numerous world-renowned institutes and centers, such as the Materials Research Laboratory; the Institute for Energy...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
2024 Appointed to U.S. Defense Science Study Group (DSSG)| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Every human starts out as a single cell, a fertilized egg, which then divides and develops into various cell types, such as skin cells, liver cells, and blood cells. Although these cell types look and function differently, they contain exactly the same DNA. But, how can the same genetic code be used to build more than two hundred different cell types in a human body? Researchers have shown that a cell’s function comes down to the thousands of genes that are present in a person’s DNA seque...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor James B. Rawlings has received the most prestigious award for chemical engineering education in the U.S., the Warren K. Lewis Award for Chemical Engineering Education from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The prize, named after one of the founders of the chemical engineering discipline, recognizes distinguished and continuing contributions to education in the field. Rawlings, the Mellichamp Process Control Chair at UCSB, was...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Egg and sperm are unique cells that pass on genetic information in humans and other mammals from one generation to the next. They originate from a small group of cells called primordial germ cells (PGCs) that form early in a developing embryo. Because researchers have minimal access to early post-implanted human embryos for ethical reasons, very little is known about the process by which PGCs arise in humans. | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
While completing his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Michigan, Phil Christopher attended monthly meetings of the Michigan Chapter of the North American Catalysis Society (MC-NACS). Christopher, who is currently a professor of chemical engineering at UC Santa Barbara, said that attending the MC-NACS Annual Symposium was an annual highlight, because the recipient of the Guiseppe Parravano Award for Excellence in Catalysis Research, the chapter’s most prestigious award, ga...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Three chemical engineering PhD students, Daniel Arnold, Elaina Blair, and Titus Quah, have received fellowships for the 2024-’25 academic year from UC Santa Barbara’s Graduate Division. The Central Campus Fellowships are awarded on the basis of merit and promise of productivity. | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Chemical engineering professor M. Scott Shell has received a distinguished lifetime honor within the scientific community of being elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is among 502 scientists, engineers, and innovators across 24 disciplines who make up the 2023 class. The association is the world’s largest general scientific society and publishes the Science family of journals. Fewer than 1 percent of its members are elected fellows each ...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering student Anika Jena has received a 2024 Goldwater Scholarship, one of the most prestigious national scholarships given to undergraduate students planning research careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering. Jena, a second-year undergraduate, was one of 438 students named 2024 Goldwater Scholars from 1,353 undergraduates students nominated by 466 academic institutions in the United States, according to the Barry Goldwater Scholarship &Exc...| www.chemengr.ucsb.edu
Warren G. and Katharine S. Schlinger Professor | www.chemengr.ucsb.edu