Letter to Alumni, Fall/Winter 2020
___________________________________
December 2020
William G. Lowrie Department of
Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
From the desk of Umit S. Ozkan
_____________________________________
Dear Alumni and Friends of the Department,
I hope this finds you and your loved ones in good health. Like all of you, we have had to make adjustments in response to the pandemic, but I am pleased that many things have gone surprisingly well.
One great piece of news is that the College of Engineering has hired a new dean! Acclaimed roboticist, entrepreneur and educator Ayanna Howard, PhD, assumes the on March 1, following the retirement of Dean David B. Williams, who successfully led the College of Engineering since 2011. We look forward to an exciting future with Dr. Howard—the first woman to lead the College of Engineering!
Within the department, it has been a busy time as we modified almost all our courses for online teaching. In addition, we had to reconfigure the scheduling and operation of our Unit Operations lab for 200 of our students who took it this semester.
We managed to keep our research labs open, with our graduate students showing utmost vigilance in following the safety protocols to keep themselves and each other safe.
Our faculty have been especially productive, submitting a record number of proposals and receiving several prestigious grants and awards.
Our students, particularly those in our undergraduate AIChE chapter, continued to show real leadership, organizing several virtual events (from coffee chats to interview advice panels) for their members to help them feel connected. Graduate students also demonstrated enormous creativity and resourcefulness in organizing a virtual Graduate Research Symposium, with record attendance from alumni and industry.
We continue to seek ways of improving the department environment so that all students feel valued, cared for, and nurtured for success. One effort is to initiate an alumni mentoring network, teaming up individual students from our sophomore class with alumni who are interested in a long-term mentoring relationship. In the next months, we may reach out to some of you asking if you would be interested.
Of course, our alumni continue to impress us with their diverse accomplishments and activities. This fall we celebrated two of our alumni, Linda Broadbelt (‘89) and Bill Dawson (‘81), who received College of Engineering Distinguished Alumni Awards.
In this issue, we also feature the career of Chanel David (‘03), whose childhood desire for an “EZ Bake Oven” was finally fulfilled by a career in food science, allowing her to work with every size, shape and style of oven imaginable!
Also in this issue, we are introducing an alumni Career Corner, consisting of a sampling of alumni jobs and recent promotions we “harvested” from LinkedIn. We hope you will find it interesting and may even find out about some of your classmates. Please let us know when you have career updates you would like to share! We would love to include them next time.
Best wishes to you all for a Happy New Year.
Take good care and keep in touch.
Umit S. Ozkan
College of Engineering Distinguished
Professor and Chair
p.s. You may link to the PDF version of the Fall 2020 Koffolt News here.