CHAITAN KHOSLA School of Engineering STANFORD Wells H. Hauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor Keck, Room 337 CHEMI CAL Chair, Department of 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, , 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 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 . 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 . 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. Their work also continues to explore new approaches for micro and nanoelectronics such as next-generation photoresists. The Bent group has grown to include 14 graduate students, 2 postdoctoral fellows, and several undergraduates representing chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, electrical engineering, and chemistry. Stacey is co-directing the Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion, a multi-investigator Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the Department of Energy. She also has become a senior fellow at the Precourt Institute for Energy. This coming year, Stacey will develop a new Engineering Fundamental course together with Channing Robertson, Energy: Chemical Transformations for Production, Storage, and Use. She is on the editorial board of Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, which launched its

ChemE-3 inaugural issue this year. She has served as chair of the trustees of the American Vacuum Society and continues her service on the Stanford Faculty Senate.

Alex Dunn joined the department in January 2009. His group’s primary interest is to understand how mechanical forces exerted on and between cells control both desirable processes, such as wound healing, and disease progression, for example, cancer metastasis. Improved understanding of how cells generate and respond to mechanical force will contribute to a variety of applications, notably in tissue engineering. Alex’s students have had notable success in the previous year. The group has grown to include five graduate students, and the lab’s first postdoc alumnus, David Altman, has joined the faculty at Willamette University. Group members Diego Ramallo and Arjun Adhikari received NSF Predoctoral and Stanford Graduate Fellowships. Alex recently received a Digestive Disease Center Pilot Grant. He continues to teach courses in biochemistry and chemical kinetics, and looks forward to helping to revamp the Senior ChE 180A laboratory experience next year.

Gerald Fuller is continuing his work on the rheology of complex materials. Recent work of the Fuller group has focused on problems occurring at liquid/liquid and solid/liquid interfaces. Many of the applications of this work are biological, such as oriented biomacromolecular substrates that can control the direction of cell growth and the mechanical stability of the tear films protecting our eyes. An interesting non-biological application of the group’s research concerns the use of viscoelasticity to develop fluids that very effectively remove nanoparticles from silicon wafers. Gerry spearheaded the team of enthusiastic alumni and staff that orchestrated the recent celebration of our 50th anniversary. The result was a wonderful occasion that brought friends and alumni of the department together to reminisce and toast one another’s success. It was truly gratifying to witness this gathering and to realize the impact the department continues to have in the lives of students, faculty, and staff, and the benefit it brings to our society. For the past two years Gerry has served as president of the International Committee on Rheology. In this capacity, he has worked to help establish societies in promising regions of growth throughout the world; this included travel to India and Brazil to help inaugurate societies there. In recognition of his work, he received the 2009 Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Rheology. He also received a Journal of Rheology Publication Award for his paper “Analysis of the Magnetic-Rod Interfacial Stress Rheometer.” Gerry received an honorary doctorate from the University of Crete and was named an associate member of the University of Wales Institute of Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. I am particularly indebted to Gerry for his outstanding service as interim chair in academic year 2008-09 during my sabbatical.

Lisa Hwang is wrapping up her fourth year as a senior lecturer in the department. During the past year, she taught or co-taught several chemical engineering classes including CHEMENG150, CHEMENG160, CHEMENG185A, CHEMENG450, and ENGR20. (Remember all those wonderful course numbers?) She also leads a stimulating weekly seminar program for our undergraduates pursing honors theses. Last but not least, she is leading an extensively revamped and intensive effort within the department to train first-time teaching assistants. Lisa was awarded two Center for Teaching and Learning TA Training Grants that allowed her to develop a tailored program focusing on chemical engineering courses and TA needs. Last year, this customized program was highlighted in “What’s Working in TA Training,” published by the teaching center. Lisa also serves as a pre-major advisor for bright-eyed freshmen eager to learn about chemical engineering. She is excited to take on another crop of eight frosh this fall.

ChemE-4 Tom Jaramillo’s research group continues to thrive in the area of energy. Roughly one-third of the group works on semiconductors, with an aim to manipulate their electronic band structure in order to better harvest solar photons while providing sufficient photo-voltage to drive fuel synthesis reactions at the surface. The remaining two-thirds of the research group focuses on catalyst surface chemistry; they seek to tailor surface properties in order to maximize electron transfer and speed up reaction kinetics for fuel synthesis, such as carbon dioxide reduction to hydrocarbons and the balancing reaction of water oxidation. The Jaramillo group recently has developed a manganese oxide–based catalyst that is nearly as effective as precious metals (ruthenium, iridium, and platinum) in the oxidation of water and reduction of oxygen. Tom was recently awarded the Mohr Davidow Ventures Innovators Award, which recognizes extraordinary faculty early in their career for innovative approaches to major scientific and technical challenges in energy and materials. Tom was also the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the Stanford Society of Chicano/Latino Engineers and Scientists.

I, Chaitan Khosla, returned in summer 2009 from my sabbatical at the Institute for Organic Chemistry, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. What a year it was! I learned about several exciting new themes in catalysis research, ranging from transition metal catalysis to biocatalysis. My German is also a lot better now, as I made an effort to converse in German as much as I could during my year abroad. By starting a new company (Flamentera AG) in collaboration with a local entrepreneur/VC, I am gradually gaining insight into the cultural similarities and differences between entrepreneurship in Europe and the United States. Last but not least, my family and I spent many weekends and quite a few weeks traveling within Switzerland and Europe. Meanwhile, my research group has continued to thrive. Our longstanding program on engineering antibiotic biosynthesis remains the backbone of my pedagogical endeavors. At the same time our investigations into celiac disease pathomechanisms has taken us much more heavily into human biology than I would have imagined. Within the past year, our fledgling research program on biofuels attracted the attention and sponsorship of LS9 Inc., a local biotech company. Last year, I collaborated with Lisa Hwang to teach ENGR20, Introduction to Chemical Engineering, and also started teaching a new graduate-level course on medicinal chemistry.

Channing Robertson is returning this fall after a sabbatical period following his service as senior associate dean for faculty and academic affairs and as a member of the provost’s University Budget Committee. He plans to teach his two sophomore seminars and will be introducing (with Stacey Bent) a new course in energy aimed at freshmen and sophomores. Channing continues to serve on several National Academy of Sciences committees and is representing the United States in establishing the science base for the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, a treaty currently signed by 168 countries. He is eager to serve the department as its “elder statesman,” aka Yoda, in the years ahead.

Eric Shaqfeh prepares for the graduation of two PhD students in the next few months (David Richter, Mechanical Engineering, and Shikha Somani, Chemical Engineering) while welcoming a new student, Vivek Narsimhan (Chemical Engineering), and a new research associate, Dr. Laura Guglielmini, to the group. Eric continues to be heavily involved as the Technical Area 2 lead of the new Army High Performance Computing Center, including simulating platelet margination and nanoparticle flows in the blood microcirculation. These simulations have been greatly enhanced with the recent ARRA federal stimulus grant for a $6M hybrid visualization

ChemE-5 computer cluster for which Eric was lead PI. He serves on the AIChE Fluid Mechanics Programming Committee and on the advisory boards of the chemical engineering departments at Cornell and the University of Tennessee, and continues as associate editor of Physics of Fluids. Eric finished his second year in the Stanford Faculty Senate. He looks forward to the coming year, where his primary project is finishing a new book, A First Course in Microhydrodynamics, co-authored with Andy Acrivos.

Andy Spakowitz is finishing his fourth year at Stanford. Andy and the eight students in his lab have established a diverse research program in the areas of DNA biophysics, protein self-assembly, and charge transport in conjugated polymers. Over the past year, several projects have resulted in important new discoveries that are reported in three manuscripts appearing in Physical Review Letters, Physical Review E, and Biophysical Journal. The first of these papers will be featured in the online publication Physics (physics.aps.org), which highlights important papers published in the Physical Review journals. Over the past year, Andy has grown his teaching portfolio to include a new graduate-level class, Physics of Biomacromolecules. Andy and several graduate and undergraduate students have an ongoing outreach project at the hospital school at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford to provide science labs for middle school and high school students who are being treated for childhood cancer and other diseases. This outreach project has resulted in over 20 new labs that were run by the participating Stanford students helping in the project. The project was featured in an article titled “Science Funding: Science for the Masses,” which appeared in the May 26, 2010, edition of Nature.

Alfred Spormann and his group have been expanding their fundamental research in and use of microbes for bioenergy, bioremediation, and human health. One new and highly promising research focus of the group is on bio-electro fuels, which exploit the capacity of some microbes to synthesize organic molecules from atmospheric carbon dioxide and electrons derived from cathodic surfaces, thereby providing the means to produce CO2-neutral fuel hydrocarbons from electricity. Research into bioremediation of chlorethenes, the most prevalent groundwater contaminants in the United States, was boosted by several breakthroughs of his group, including the completion of the genome sequence of a vinyl chloride-degrading microbe, providing for the first time insights into the evolution of these novel biodegradation traits. Research into the microbiology associated with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, in collaboration with researchers from the Stanford School of Medicine, was rewarded with a Bio-X grant and has been providing valuable insights into the role of microorganisms in this common disease. Alfred has been very active on numerous DOE and NSF review panels and workshops, and his yearly teaching of a four-week international summer course in microbiology at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove is continuing now in its fifth year with substantial support from NSF, DOE, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Jim Swartz had three PhD candidates successfully defend their theses this year. He continues to pursue a variety of applications and technology extensions for his cell-free biology platform. In the hydrogen production project, initial feasibility was established for a highly productive process for efficiently producing hydrogen from glucose. A new biochemical reaction was also discovered. Using a new in vitro enzyme activation procedure, his group demonstrated that both cyanide and carbon monoxide are produced from tyrosine for insertion into the complex iron-sulfur cofactor required for hydrogenase activity. The virus-like particle (VLP) program also continues with new funding to develop an MRI imaging agent for cancer detection and ablation. The ability to engineer VLPs with multiple attached ligands in order to produce improved vaccines was also demonstrated.

ChemE-6 Last year, Jim rejuvenated the NIH biotechnology training program founded by Channing Robertson and, with Lisa Hwang, updated the Advances in Biotechnology graduate course to include a new emphasis on metabolic engineering and biofuels technologies. He also worked with a graduate student, Cem Albayrak, to develop and deliver a new laboratory project to a group of about 100 local, disadvantaged high school students. The lab allowed the students to measure the rate of production of green fluorescent protein by the cell-free system and to observe the effects of changing DNA, amino acid, energy source, and cell extract concentrations. The rewarding experience was covered by the Stanford Report.

Cliff Wang is finishing his fourth year in the department. He and his six graduate students have been focused on developing new genetic tools to engineer and probe the mechanisms involved in mammalian cell biology and cancer. To do so, they are engineering cells that will increase in fluorescence to report proliferation activity. They are also developing gene expression tools to perturb and optimize gene sets. Cliff’s earliest students are now gearing up to present their findings at conferences at the end of 2010. In the classroom, Cliff has continued to teach a biochemical engineering laboratory course for seniors and a freshman/sophomore course on biotechnology. In the latter course, alumnus Howie Rosen guest-lectured for one week on drug delivery systems. Those lectures garnered rave reviews—thank you, Howie.

Department News Admissions to our PhD program for the 2010-11 academic year were once again very successful. Twenty PhD and 7 MS students are expected this fall. Thanks to Stacey Bent and Cliff Wang for their efforts in recruiting this outstanding class.

For 2009-10, 20 students received BS degrees, of which 9 were awarded with departmental honors and 3 with distinction. One of our graduating seniors was recognized with a Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award. In addition, 15 MS and 12 PhD degrees were conferred. Please join us in congratulating these outstanding young men and women!

Staying Connected We encourage you to visit our website at cheme.stanford.edu regularly for updated information about the department. From this site, you can link to many sources for detailed information about our faculty, students, research programs, and teaching initiatives. If you have any suggestions regarding the site or the programs described here, please contact me.

I hope that you will remain an active member of our alumni community by keeping us apprised of your activities and whereabouts. You can log on to soe.stanford.edu/alumni/update.html to update your contact information. Or, if it is more convenient, fill out the enclosed alumni news update form. We appreciate your keeping in touch.

With best regards,

Chaitan Khosla Wells H. Hauser and Harold M. Petiprin Professor Chair, Department of Chemical Engineering

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