Stanford University E N G I N E E R I N G Chemical Engineering Stanford, CA 94305-5025

CHAITAN KHOSLA School of Engineering STANFORD Wells H. Hauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor Keck, Room 337 CHEMI CAL Chair, Department of Stanford University E n g i n e e r i n G Chemical Engineering Stanford, CA 94305-5025 Fall 2010 Dear Chemical Engineering Alumni and Friends, As the new academic year begins, I’d like to tell you about some of the significant events in the Stanford Department of Chemical Engineering over the past year. Our 50th Birthday Party On May 11, at this year’s Mason Lectures, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Stanford Department of Chemical Engineering. And what a celebration it was! Special thanks to Gerry Fuller, Pam Juanes, and a core group of alumni including John Richardson, Eric Lutkin, Carol Fisher, and Lisa Hwang for making the event a huge success. What started as a dream in the brain of the late Professor David Mason half a century ago has now evolved into a department with 15 active faculty, approximately 75 undergraduate majors, more than 100 graduate students, and more than 20 postdoctoral researchers. Last year alone, students and faculty in the department collectively published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in the primary literature. More than a dozen U.S. patents were awarded to researchers in the department. And somehow, if you ask any student or faculty member, they’ll shrug their shoulders and say that we’re only just getting started. Much has changed in the past 50 years, but some things remain the same. Foremost among the constants are our shared passion for teaching and learning and our unshakeable confidence that as long as Stanford chemical engineers remain well schooled in the foundational sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology, and as long as they are adequately introduced to the awesome conceptual and practical power of the preparative, analytical, and modeling tools that we call chemical engineering, good things will continue to happen. Which they do. In the spirit of acknowledging the preeminence of chemical engineering science to the mission of the department, we invited four stalwarts in the field to share with us their vision of the future of chemical engineering. Robert Davis is the Tisone Chair in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His lecture on “Select Problems in Complex Flow with Small Reynolds Numbers” highlighted the pivotal role of transport phenomena in our discipline’s past, present, and future. Glenn Fredrickson is the Mitsubishi Chemical Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His lecture on “Field- Based Simulations for the Design of Polymer Nanostructures” was a vivid testimony to the enormous leverage that chemical engineers exercise in the area of soft materials design and engineering when they are armed with theoretical skills in statistical thermodynamics. Frances Arnold is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at Caltech. Her lecture on “How Proteins Adapt: Engineering by Evolution” Phone: 650.723.3132 • Fax: 650.723.9780 • E-mail: [email protected] • Web: cheme.stanford.edu gave us a glimpse into an exciting interface between chemical engineering and biotechnology. Cynthia Friend is the Theodore Williams Richards Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Her lecture on “Bridging Surface Science to Catalysis: Gold Shining Through the Pressure Gap” reminded us of the awesome power of catalysis in chemistry, chemical engineering, and society at large. The students, alumni, and faculty in the audience were truly privileged to hear such an inspirational series of lectures by this truly exceptional group of teacher-scholars. That evening we were also treated to a spectacular after-dinner talk by one of our very own alumnae, Dr. Mae Jemison, BS ’77. As the first African American woman to go into space in 1992, Mae did actually reach for the stars. Since then, she has been a successful engineer, doctor, entrepreneur, and catalyst for social change in the United States and across the globe. Her lecture recounted her experiences as a Stanford undergrad and exhorted fellow Stanford chemical engineers to consider the societal and environmental impact of their technological achievements. Nearly 200 of you joined us on May 11 to celebrate the department’s 50th birthday. Once again, I’d like to thank you for coming, and I hope that the occasion was both nostalgic and stimulating for you. Throughout his career, Dave Mason went to great lengths to foster the culture of the Stanford Chemical Engineering family. As guardians of that legacy, my colleagues and I were delighted that you gave us this opportunity to reconnect with you. We hope that you will continue to find value in these family ties, and I look forward to welcoming you back at next year’s Mason Lectures. The 2011 Mason Lectures will be delivered by our very own George “Bud” Homsy, now a professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. Bud’s lectures will be held May 2-3, 2011. Mark your calendars. New Hires Every new faculty member who joins the Stanford Department of Chemical Engineering greatly influences its mission and long-term direction. I am therefore thrilled to report that, within the past year, we have recruited two new faculty members to our department. Jens Norskov joined our faculty as a professor in June. He is also jointly appointed as a professor of photon science at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. Jens is an accomplished computational scientist who has made seminal contributions to theoretical chemistry and its applications to heterogeneous catalysis. His research has direct relevance to a number of practical problems in energy science and materials science. Prior to Stanford, Jens was at the Technical University of Denmark, where he directed the Lundbeck Foundation’s Center for Atomic-Scale Materials Design. Jens is an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters and an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. Last year, he received the prestigious Somorjai Award for Creative Work in Catalysis from the American Chemical Society. At Stanford, Jens is interested in attacking important energy problems including electrochemical and photochemical fuel production, fuel cell design, and energy storage. If there is one message I have received from chemical engineers at peer institutions across the country in my travels in 2010, it is that we are incredibly lucky to have Jens join us. I know you will feel the same when you get to know him and his science. During the past year, under the leadership of Gerry Fuller, we also ran a broad-area search for a junior faculty member. I am pleased to announce the appointment of Elizabeth Sattely as an ChemE-2 assistant professor, effective January 2011. Beth received her PhD in chemistry from Boston College. Her thesis under the supervision of Amir Hoyveda focused on molybdenum-catalyzed synthesis of complex molecules. This work resulted in the publication of four papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and also contributed to a major breakthrough in organometallic catalysis published in Nature. In postdoctoral research under the supervision of Christopher Walsh at Harvard Medical School, Beth followed her scientific interests toward yet another horizon—microbial strategies for making complex natural products. Thus far, her postdoctoral research has resulted in the publication of three more papers in JACS. She also co-wrote a comprehensive review on current advances in the understanding of microbial biosynthetic pathways. In recognition of her achievements and potential as an independent investigator, she was awarded a prestigious “K99-R00” Award from the National Institutes of Health. At Stanford, Beth plans to establish a research program in the area of plant metabolism, which could enable innovations in biotechnology and the energy sector. We are delighted to have Beth join us next year. More Faculty News Following are some additional highlights of our faculty’s research and external recognition: Zhenan Bao received grants to start several new directions related to energy research in the past year. Her group received funding from the Global Climate and Energy Project to develop carbon-based transparent electrodes for solar cells. She is part of a Center on Advanced Organic Solar Cells funded by the newly established King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. She is also excited to start a program on carbon-based materials for energy storage recently funded by the Precourt Institute for Energy. Last year, Zhenan was the recipient of the 2009 Beilby Medal and Prize from the Royal Society of Chemistry for her contribution to printable electronics. She was also chosen by the National Science Foundation as an American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow, which provides her two additional years of funding on one of her current grants. Zhenan notes the graduation of four PhD students in the past year: Maria Wang, Chemical Engineering; Bill Liu, Electrical Engineering; Jung Kyu Lee, Chemistry; and Ajay Virkar, Chemical Engineering. One of her former PhD students, Mark Roberts, will join the faculty of chemical engineering at Clemson University. One of her postdocs, Christopher Bettinger, will join the faculty of bioengineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She enjoyed traveling and giving plenary lectures in China, France, and Korea. She started a three-year term on the Board of Chemical Sciences and Technology for the National Academy of Sciences. Stacey Bent’s research program continues in the area of sustainable energy, with her group working toward cheaper and more efficient solar cells, fuel cells, and catalysts using surface chemistry and materials synthesis at the nanoscale.

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