The CBEE Class of 2019 was one of the largest and most diverse graduating classes in the school’s history.
In June, CBEE celebrated one of the largest and most diverse graduating classes in our school’s history, with preliminary numbers showing 200 undergraduates and 34 graduate students receiving degrees. Forty percent of those graduating were women.
Gregory S. Herman, school head and the James and Shirley Kuse Chair in Chemical Engineering addressed about 1,100 family members and friends who came to cheer on loved ones at the 2019 CBEE Graduation Celebration, held June 14 at Corvallis High School.
“As you embark on the next phase of your lives, please remember what you have done, and what you can do, to benefit not just yourselves, your families, and your employers — but also your communities, your colleagues, your nation, your world,” Herman said. ” We hope you will use your engineering principles to create a better future no matter where you go .”
The following undergraduates were recognized for their outstanding achievements:
Chemical Engineering
Erik Muehlenkamp Memorial Leadership Award Ryan Cashen, Maria Politi
Academic Achievement Award Ben Avery, Amreen Hussaini
Schulein Outstanding Student Award Griffin Drake
Bioengineering
Randy Saito Memorial Leadership Award Sonia Ahrens
Academic Achievement Award Ryan Forcier
Outstanding Student Award Nicole Laschober, Jason Dong
Environmental Engineering
Leadership Award Lauren Tetzloff
Academic Achievement Award Lauren Roof
Outstanding Student Award Eileen Lukens
Eager Beaver Award (CBEE
Student Clubs)
Chemical Engineering Ranya Al-Khaledy, Monika Hoke
Lauren Lippman has one bit of advice for her fellow engineering students at Oregon State University: Make sure you love what you do.
“I’m very fortunate in that I truly enjoy everything that I’m doing here,” said the 19-year-old chemical engineering major and Honors College student, originally from Phoenix, Arizona.
Just halfway through her second year on campus, “everything” is an accurate description for what she’s done. In addition to keeping up with a rigorous academic program, she works in a research lab on campus, serves in the College of Engineering Ambassadors program, mentors other engineering students, is an active member in several student clubs, and was on this year’s Homecoming Court.
After her first year on campus, Lippman was selected to participate in the Johnson Internship program, which provides research and mentoring opportunities for students early in their undergraduate careers. Lippman spent that summer with Tala Navab-Daneshmand, assistant professor of environmental engineering, studying the fate of enteric pathogens in waste streams. She has continued working with Navab during her sophomore year.
“Lauren is very passionate about her work, pays attention to details and loves learning,” Navab said. “She brings a lot of positive energy with her wherever she goes.”
In 2018, Lippman received the Freshman Recognition Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE). The award is granted to the student who has been the most active in their student chapter during their first year. Lippman was part of the ChemE Car team that placed second in the AIChE regional competition and went to nationals in Pittsburgh last fall.
During her sophomore year, Lippman has led the SWEsters, a mentoring program on campus offered by the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). For her work mentoring first-year women in engineering, SWE honored her with the Karena Dokken Mentor Award, and she will be leading the SWEsters again next year.
Lippman is also active with Inventors Enterprise, a student organization that promotes entrepreneurship and social responsibility. She was part of a team working to develop user-friendly technology to detect heavy metals in drinking water. They competed at the 2018 InventOR Collegiate Challenge and won a $2,500 prize to further develop their project and compete at the next level.
Lippman says she’s passionate about environmental issues and sees herself someday working in industry to advance clean water technology.
“Growing up next to a big river, watching its levels rise and fall over time, you can’t help but be aware of just what a vital resource water is,” Lippman said. “So much depends on it.”
But for the next two years, Lippman is focused on being a student — and getting the most out of what that experience has to offer.
Concept Warehouse targets education gaps often hidden by ‘expert’s blind spot’
Milo Koretsky, professor of chemical engineering, surveys the classroom with a Concept Warehouse question.
Teach a student a formula, and help her solve a problem. Teach a student a concept, and help her create solutions.
Engineering education research at Oregon State University aimed at improving the way students learn core concepts has received continued funding from the National Science Foundation, expected to total around $2 million over four years.
The grant, awarded in August 2018, will support ongoing development and expansion of the Concept Warehouse, a web-based instructional tool that currently enables faculty within the discipline of chemical engineering to better provide their students concept-based instruction. Specifically, the grant will extend the scope of the Concept Warehouse into the discipline of mechanical engineering.
“One thing we do really well as engineering faculty is teach students the procedures to solve problems,” said Milo Koretsky, professor of chemical engineering and the project’s principal investigator. “But they often don’t tie the procedures to the foundational concepts that they’re built on.”
First launched in 2010 in collaboration with the University of Colorado, the Colorado School of Mines, and the University of Kentucky, the Concept Warehouse was conceived as a “cyber-enabled infrastructure” that could be used throughout the core chemical engineering curriculum. The goal was to create a community of learning focused on concept-based instruction.
Today, that community encompasses more than 1,000 faculty at institutions across the United States and around the world. Nearly 3,000 concept-based questions have been created, and a curated selection has been sorted into a number of topical “concept inventories” that participating faculty can browse using a web-based interface. (“Sort of like shopping on Amazon,” Koretsky said.) Over 25,000 students have used the Concept Warehouse in the classroom, collectively answering more than 1 million questions.
Concept-based instruction aims to address the gaps between what students understand and what their instructors think they understand. It’s a well-documented problem in engineering education, one that has been observed and written about for decades. There’s even a name for it: the expert’s blind spot.
Students use web browsers or a mobile app to respond to questions in class.
“As a faculty member, when I give a procedural problem, I see the connection to the concept. So, if my students can do the problem, I believe they’ve learned the concept,” Koretsky said. “And it turns out that, a big part of the time, students can just follow a pattern in doing the problem.”
The Concept Warehouse doesn’t seek to eliminate traditional procedural problem-solving exercises, Koretsky says. Rather it augments and supplements them with questions that specifically target students’ understanding of the core concepts involved.
“It’s not that teaching procedural problem-solving is a bad thing,” Koretsky said. “But we’ve found that if you do that alone, certain types of learning that you may think are happening, namely concept-based learning, might not actually be going on.”
Tom Ekstedt, an IT specialist at Oregon State whose work supports the Concept Warehouse and related research, likens the project to taking an engineer’s perspective to the problem of engineering education itself: How do you create a better engineer?
“If you take a systems-level view, you can see engineering education as a process,” Ekstedt said. “You have students coming into the system with a variety of different backgrounds and skill sets. They spend four or five years here, and they come out as engineering graduates. If you want to improve the quality of the end product, you need to look at ways to refine the process and, ideally, to be able to measure the specific qualities you’re looking for.”
One of the ways the Concept Warehouse breaks free from rote procedural learning is by simply taking numbers out of the equation, challenging students to explain core concepts in their own words. A basic question might ask students to consider gas flowing through an open valve and ask them what happens to the temperature of the gas as it comes out.
“In that example, the students can’t just identify the type of problem and solve for x to get the right answer,” Koretsky said. “They have to apply foundational concepts of enthalpy and energy balances in open systems to reason through it.”
The idea, Koretsky says, is to have students explicitly engage in types of activities where they relate to core concepts — from simple questions like the gas-valve example to more detailed, inquiry-based activities, like interactive virtual labs where students might spend a full 50 minutes on a single concept.
“What we’re doing is developing ways to build conceptual understanding,” Koretsky said. “To enable students to not just be able to solve problems very similar to the ones they’ve seen, but to enable those problem-solving skills to be adaptable to different types of contexts, like real engineers.”
Students interact with Concept Warehouse questions in the classroom through a mobile phone app or a web browser. Instructors receive real-time feedback, showing them how students employ different strategies in approaching the questions, where they had difficulty, and which concepts might need additional reinforcement. Students can let instructors know where they’re having trouble, or ask questions without fear of embarrassment.
With the Concept Warehouse, smartphones become powerful tools for communication in the classroom.
Koretsky says this two-way communication provides invaluable data for instructors.
“If I were to just put a problem up on the board and ask for volunteers, I would probably see the same four or five hands go up every time,” Koretsky said. “You end up with a self-selected sample that is not very representative. When students respond individually through the app, I am hearing from all of them, and I am able to see at a glance what’s working and what isn’t.”
The current project, which runs through August 2022, involves collaboration with other institutions, including Allan Hancock College, a two-year community college in California, and University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez. Other partners include Bucknell University and California Polytechnic State University.
By broadening the types of learning environments where the Concept Warehouse is developed and tested, Koretsky says it will be better suited to serve diverse learning populations.
“Rather than adopting a one-size-fits-all approach based on what works here, at an R1 [very high research activity] land-grant university in the Pacific Northwest, we want to be smarter about adapting approaches that are cognizant of the very different issues with cultures and populations that are different,” Koretsky said.
Gregory S. Herman, professor of chemical engineering and an expert in surface chemistry, has been appointed head of the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering (CBEE) at Oregon State University. Herman has also been named the James and Shirley Kuse Chair in Chemical Engineering.
Herman joined the faculty in 2009 as an associate professor and was promoted to professor in 2015. He brings a remarkable breadth and depth of experience that spans academia, industry, and governmental laboratories, including Sharp Laboratories of America, HP, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
“I take great pride in our collective success and am excited about the energy and innovation that Greg will bring to our community in his new role,” said Scott Ashford, Kearney Professor and dean of Oregon State’s College of Engineering. “I look forward to seeing the continued growth in excellence and reputation of CBEE under his leadership.”
Herman has expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity to lead CBEE’s dedicated faculty and staff. He is especially looking forward to advancing the school’s upward trajectory in undergraduate and graduate student success, research, and scholarship. In his new appointment, Herman will manage the school’s academic program, which serves nearly 1,000 undergraduate and more than 100 graduate students, and oversee a unit with 61 faculty and staff.
“The combination of chemical, biological, and environmental engineering within the same unit gives us a unique competitive advantage, and I am excited about the many collaborative and impactful opportunities that will propel our reputation,” Herman said.
Herman is an internationally renowned researcher in the interdisciplinary areas of oxide-based semiconductors development for thin-film transistor applications, including flexible electronics and displays. He has extended the application of these materials to transparent field-effect sensors for glucose monitoring. He has published more than 115 peer-reviewed scientific papers and holds 67 U.S. patents. He is a fellow of the American Vacuum Society.
As the Oregon State site director of the Northwest Nanotechnology Infrastructure center in partnership with the University of Washington, Herman has been instrumental in bringing new research capabilities to Oregon State, including the near-ambient pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and scanning tunneling microscopy system.
Herman received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.
Nanosized cages may play a big role in reducing energy consumption in science and industry, and machine-learning research at Oregon State University aims to accelerate the deployment of these remarkable molecules.
The porous organic cage molecules being studied at OSU are able to selectively capture gas molecules, potentially enabling huge energy savings in the myriad gas separations conducted in the chemical sector.
“These porous molecular solids are like sponges that soak up gases discriminately,” said Cory Simon, assistant professor of chemical engineering and corresponding author of a study published in ACS Central Science.
Together, the separation and purification of chemical mixtures is responsible for more than 10 percent of the world’s energy consumption.
Porous cage molecules have nanosized cavities intrinsic to their structure, and gas molecules are attracted to and trapped within these cavities via adsorption.
“But each cage adsorbs certain gases more readily than others, and this property potentially makes the cages useful for separating gas mixtures more energy-efficiently,” Simon said.
However, there are thousands of these cage molecules that could be synthesized – to make even one of them and test its properties takes months in the lab – and hundreds of different chemical separations are required in industry; hence the need for a computational approach to sort through the possibilities and find the best molecule for the job at hand.
Simon exploited the idea that the shape of any given cavity is responsible for which gas molecules it most readily attracts.
Simon and students Arni Sturluson, Melanie Huynh and Arthur York employed an “unsupervised” machine-learning method to categorize and group together cage molecules based on their cavity shapes and, thus, adsorption properties.
Unsupervised means the computer did the learning about shape/property relationships on its own; it wasn’t given any labels to instruct it.
“Just show the data to the algorithm, and it automatically finds patterns – structure – in the data,” Simon said.
The researchers used a training dataset of 74 experimentally synthesized porous organic cage molecules that were each computationally scanned, resulting in a 3D “porosity” image of each similar to an image generated by a CT scan.
“On the basis of these 3D images, we took inspiration from a facial recognition algorithm, eigenfaces, to group together cages with similarly shaped cavities,” he said. “Using the singular value decomposition, we encoded the 3D images of the cages into lower-dimensional vectors.”
Simon explains the process using the analogy of people’s faces.
“Imagine you were forced to map everyone’s face onto a point in a two-dimensional scatter plot while preserving as much information as you can about the faces,” he said. “So each face is described by just two numbers, and similar-looking faces are grouped close by in the scatter plot. Essentially, the singular value decomposition performed this encoding, but for porous cage molecules.”
The research demonstrated that the learned encoding captures the salient features of the cavities of porous cages and can predict properties of the cages that relate to cavity shape.
“Our methods could be applied to learn latent representations of cavities within other classes of porous materials and of shapes of molecules in general,” Simon said.
Photo credit: Functional Morphology and Biomechanics lab, University of Kiel.
The next generation of high-tech adhesives could take some design cues from the tongues of frogs, according to new research led by the Oregon State University College of Engineering.
Findings were published Nov. 26 in the journal Biointerphases.
Frogs use their highly specialized tongues to capture prey, with a force that can exceed their own body weight. This is possible, in part, because the frog’s tongue is covered with a sticky mucus that functions as a pressure-sensitive adhesive.
“This mucus is able to generate large adhesive forces in response to the high strain of retraction,” said the study’s corresponding author, Joe Baio, assistant professor of bioengineering. “The goal of this study was to determine the chemical structure of the surface of this mucus after a tongue strike, which had not been done previously.”
Mucus is an aqueous, gel-like secretion containing proteins called mucins that naturally form linear polymeric chains that typically have disordered or “random coil” secondary and tertiary structures.
Fibril formation in frog tongue mucus enables it to function as a pressure-sensitive adhesive.
Recent studies of frog tongue mucus resulted in visual observation of fibrils — multiple protein chains twisted like fibers around a central axis — between the frog’s tongue and the target surface.
“This fibril formation indicates an induced change in the chemical structure of the mucus during tongue retraction,” Baio said. “And it is these fibrils that allow the mucus to generate strain-responsive adhesive forces by acting as molecular shock absorbers for the tongue.”
Collaborators at the Zoological Institute of the University of Kiel, Germany, collected mucus samples from three adult horned frogs. The scientists induced the frogs to strike glass microscopy slides by placing a slide about 2 inches in front of each frog and holding up a cricket immediately behind the slide.
Highly detailed near edge X-ray absorption fine structure microscopy images of the layers of mucus left behind on the slide were collected on the National Institute of Standards and Technology beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source.
OSU researchers then characterized the surface chemistry of the mucus, which, they concluded, confirms the formation of fibrils in response to tongue retraction, supporting previous classifications of the frog sticky-tongue mechanism as a pressure-sensitive adhesive.
The study was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Aarhus University Research Foundation.
Researchers from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, University of Kiel, Germany, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology were among the collaborators.
The 2018 Johnson Interns Poster Session will take place on Monday, Nov. 26, from 6 to 7 p.m. on the second floor of the Learning Innovation Center. The following posters will be presented by the students named below. (Mentors and affiliated institutions are identified in parentheses after the poster title.)
Pete and Rosalie Johnson established the Pete and Rosalie Johnson Undergraduate Internship Program to support undergraduates in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering. The Johnson Internship is available to any CBEE student who has successfully completed the first year CBEE courses CBEE 101 (or equivalent COE intro engineering course) and CBEE 102.
Emi Ampo (BioE), “Perfusate Tonicity and its Effects on Osmotic Damage in a Porcine Renal Model” (Higgins/OSU)
Solomon Baez (BioE), “Perfusate Tonicity and its Effects on Cryoprotectant Delivery in a Porcine Renal Model” (Higgins/OSU)
Renuka Bhatt (ChE), “Sustainable Solar Thermal Energy” (AuYeung/OSU)
Anne Chhing (BioE), “Quantifying Fluid Dynamics of Fetal Heart Defects by using Computational Methods on ADINA” (Rugonyi /OHSU)
Kacy Childress (ChE), “Effect of Roadside Tree Lines on Outdoor Concentrations of Traffic-Derived Particulate Matter” (Linda George/PSU)
Cameron Chun (BioE), “Algorithmic Computational Modeling of Congenital Chicken Embryo Hearts With Ventricular Defects” (Rugonyi/OHSU)
Andrew Gates (ChE), “Thin Film Transistors Via Dip Coating” (Chang/OSU)
Marisela Gonzalez Crawford (EnvE), “Interactions between Haematococcus Extracellular Polymeric Substances and Gold Nanoparticles” (Nason/OSU)
Tucker Holstun (ChE), “Lithium Ion Battery Cathodes with Enhanced Capacity and Cycling Stability Via a Novel Sol-Gel Coating” (Feng/OSU)
Alekos Hovekamp (ChE), “UiO-66 Synthesis Conditions and Growth on Silica Nanofibers” (Chang/OSU)
Riley Humbert (ChE), “Role of Carbon Supports for Pd/Au Nanoparticle-Based Catalysts” (Jaio/PSU)
Melanie Huynh (BioE), “Using Machine-Learning to Model Adsorption of Nano-Porous Materials” (Simon/OSU)
Sophia Jones (ChE), “Thinner Films: Synthesis and characterization of nano-structured compounds” (Dave Johnson/UO)
Kyra Kadhim (BioE), “Modeling the Mechanical Properties of a Human Spinal Disc” (Rochefort/OSU)
Zavi Kaul (ChE), “Testing the Reliability of a Spinal Disc Emulator ” (Rochefort/OSU)
Mira Khare (ChE), “Deciphering the genetic code using ConvNets” (Simon/OSU)
Lauren Lippman (ChE), “Inactivation of Microorganisms Using UV Radiation and a Microfluidic Reactor” (Navab/OSU)
Francine Mendoza (ChE), “Finite element analysis to investigate the cause of venous collapse after stent placement” (Rugonyi/OHSU)
Rachel O’Brien (BioE), “Expression of “Click Chemistry” Immobilized β-glucosidase Mutants by Genetic Code Expansion for Bioactive Coatings” (Schilke/OSU)
Kian Patel (ChE), “Lyophilization of Phenylalanine Dehydrogenase” (Fu/OSU)
Rachel Polaski (BioE), “Paper Microfluidic Device for Phenylketonuria Therapy” (Fu/OSU)
Heidi Reed (ChE), “Ammonia Inhibition of Anaerobic Digestion of Municipal and Gresham Sludge with FOG Addition” (Radniecki/OSU)
AJ Rise (BioE), “Facet Analysis of Pt-implanted γ-Al2O3” (Arnadottir/OSU)
Kelsey Stoerzinger joined the faculty this fall as an assistant professor of chemical engineering.
Kelsey Stoerzinger is motivated in her work by a desire to help solve the world’s energy problems. But she says it was her own natural curiosity that first led her to an academic career in engineering.
“I’m really fascinated by understanding how things work,” said Stoerzinger, who came to Oregon State this fall as an assistant professor and Callahan Faculty Scholar in Chemical Engineering. “I love digging super deep into problems. The general engineering mindset first took root for me when I was trying to understand how materials work — how they behave and deform. I like understanding how materials work the way they do, how they behave, and how they drive chemistry.”
Stoerzinger’s research focuses on electrochemistry and catalysis. Broadly speaking, her work is concerned with energy storage and conversion, and the many ways that water is used in these processes. In the simplest cases, water is used as a coolant. A lot of processes also generate wastewater, which requires engineers to design processes for treatment and recycling. And, in many reactions, water is either a product or a reactant.
A big part of Stoerzinger’s research involves looking at how to make reactions more efficient using catalysis or electrocatalysis. These processes use a type of material, called a catalyst, which is not itself consumed by the reaction. Rather, a catalyst acts as a sort of broker for the reaction — utilizing the unique chemical properties at its surface to enable a reaction to proceed more efficiently or more rapidly. Catalysts can also be used to determine the selectivity of the reaction, or what products are produced.
“I do a lot of work understanding the details of why catalysts work the way they do, fundamental studies to elaborate reaction mechanisms,” Stoerzinger said. “But the goal is to move from having an understanding about, for example, what is the rate-limiting step of a particular reaction, to figuring out how we can design around that. So the research is both to understand how these materials work and also to design and develop new materials and processes.”
Historically, Stoerzinger’s work has been concentrated in the area of electrolysis; that is, splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Energy is stored in the bonds of hydrogen and oxygen and released when the two are combined to make water. One way to get energy out of hydrogen is with fuel cells, another of Stoerzinger’s interests, and another area where catalysts play a key role.
After completing her undergraduate work in materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, Stoerzinger earned her Master of Philosophy degree in physics at Cambridge University, where she was a Churchill Scholar. From there, she went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn her doctorate with a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation.
From there, she was awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), where she was able to pursue her own research interests full-time. At PNNL, Stoerzinger focused on photoelectrochemistry. Her work involved developing new materials to convert energy from captured photons (as from sunlight) directly into chemical fuel.
“Instead of having a photovoltaic solar cell powering an electrolyzer, you are combining these two processes into one,” she said. “You can make a single material that can do all of that, which is pretty amazing. This enables you to reduce the overall footprint and eliminate a lot of waste.”
At Oregon State, Stoerzinger is interested in looking at different types of reactions, including nitrate reduction for cleaning up groundwater, and methane oxidation for fuel cells. She’s also looking at ways to reuse some wastewater streams and exploring more abundant sources of water for electrolysis.
“Right now when we use electrolysis to make hydrogen, it requires extremely clean water, and that’s a big limitation,” she said. “If we are thinking in terms of a hydrogen fuel economy, it’s going to require more water than we currently consume for drinking. This could potentially be a huge tax on our existing resources.”
In addition to her research, Stoerzinger says she has a real passion for teaching.
“Teaching is just a transformative way to touch so many people and to really shape their careers,” she said. “I remember many teachers throughout my graduate and undergraduate education who have shaped me as a person. They have made me the scientist that I am, and they will continue to influence the things that I do in my career. Being part of that transformation in someone else’s education is just awesome.”
Seven teams of faculty from the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering have been selected to spearhead innovative teaching fellowship projects this academic year. These projects, part of the school’s “Revolution in CBEE” initiative, aim to support and advance the initiative’s two main goals: inclusivity and meaningful professional learning.
The Revolution in CBEE is supported by a five-year, $2 million grant, awarded by the National Science Foundation’s “Revolutionizing Engineering Departments” (RED) program in 2015, “to enact groundbreaking, scalable and sustainable changes in undergraduate education.” CBEE’s RED grant proposal pledged to “make bold and deliberate changes to the educational environment and practices.” These projects are an instrumental part of that effort. Each project was awarded a modest stipend internally to help defray incidental costs associated with its implementation.
Below are brief descriptions of the seven projects (team lead identified in parentheses):
Writing in the CBEE Curriculum (Elain Fu, Christine Kelly)
This project aims to develop a resource specific to CBEE disciplinary knowledge, for both students and instructors, that will help to create consistent expectations across courses regarding the format and quality of student writing. Currently, students move through classes with inconsistency in writing instruction, scoring, and feedback. The team envisions the creation of a CBEE writing handbook that both instructors and students will use. This resource will allow instructors to emphasize their focus, while communicating to students the breadth of material that constitutes good writing.
Vertical Integration of Cross-Disciplinary Coursework and Advanced Computation (Kate Schilke)
This project aims to integrate advanced computational methods into coursework by developing MATLAB problems and projects for CBEE sophomore and junior core courses. These problems and projects will incorporate meaningful context and broad disciplinary representation. Some of the material will include statistics content as well. The goal is to enable faculty to adopt the problems in their course with minimal effort, regardless of their familiarity with MATLAB.
Balancing Student Assessment and Inclusivity in a Critical Introductory Course (Phil Harding)
This project aims to help transition what in the past might have been considered a “weeder” course into a precise and efficient tool for helping to determine whether individual students’ needs are best served by advancing within their engineering program. Toward that end, more information and better tools are required, to balance the need for accurate student assessment with the need for inclusivity in engineering programs. The project will collect, analyze, and share data from a critical introductory course over two consecutive fall terms. It is predicted that collecting, sharing, and discussing this data with students will increase participation, awareness, and student performance.
Professional Competency Development in Bioengineering Graduate Students through Embedded Co-Curricular Activities across Core Curriculum (Morgan Giers)
This project aims to define specific professional competencies desired by bioengineering graduate students and future employers, such as grant writing, knowledge of intellectual property, or budget calculation. This is to be accomplished through surveying students, alumni, and employers in the bioengineering industrial advisory board. The project also aims to embed co-curricular activities that advance professional competencies in the bioengineering core curriculum courses.
Improving the Instructional Practices of Senior-Level ENVE Courses: ENVE 456 (Stacey Harper)
This project aims to revamp the Sustainable Water Resources Development course taught each spring by Stacy Harper. The goal is to make the class more interactive using a problem-solution, team-based approach. Partnering with Devlin Montfort (and others), she intends to evaluate the developed teaching materials, ensure inclusive teaming during course activities, and determine assessment criteria and a strategy for targeted improvement of the classroom experience.
Inclusive Teaming (Nick AuYeung)
This project aims to develop strategies for fostering inclusivity in teamwork and collaboration across a range of engineering courses. Last year, this project team explored literature on inclusive and effective teaming strategies, and several members who taught CBEE courses tried new team formation, support, and assessment practices in their classrooms and discussed those with the group. This year, they will continue to develop content and teaching tools that support four main areas: team formation; functional teaming curricula (e.g., conflict management and effective communication); modules to engage students in the examination of complex structures, systems, and ideologies that sustain discrimination and the unequal distribution of power and resources in the practice of engineering; and assessment instruments to measure student teaming competencies
Process Simulation Curriculum Integration (Nick AuYeung, Natasha Mallette)
This project aims to integrate process simulation into foundational classes, using the Aspen software suite. For this project, team leaders, along with two highly accomplished students with at least senior standing, will work to create meaningful Aspen modules that instructors can use in their classes (typically twice per term) to reinforce conceptual understanding introduced in class through a visual process simulation, and to give students familiarity with the software. Modules will consist of written instructions and short video supplements to show software tips.
Madison Webb joined the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering this fall as the school’s newest undergraduate academic advisor. Webb joins Lindsay Wills and head advisor Kimberly Compton, as part of the school’s newly configured, dynamic, and proactive advising team, dedicated to student success.
A native of Beaverton, Webb is a proud “Beaver Believer,” and an Oregon State alum herself. After graduating in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history, Webb started working on campus with international students in the INTO partnership. She worked her way up from entry level, joining the ranks of the university’s professional faculty in 2016 as an undergraduate progression advisor.
The job of an advisor involves not only understanding complicated institutional policies and processes, but also being able to communicate them to students, in order to motivate them and keep them on track toward graduation. Webb says her experience has given her the ability to explain policies and processes to students in a variety of different ways.
“People have different learning styles,” she said. “I try to focus on that, and also the nuances of how our students got to where they are. They come from multiple different paths and backgrounds, and having additional layers of understanding helps us to be more effective in helping them.”
Webb says she derives great personal satisfaction from being able to watch students grow.
“We get to watch them as they go through these big life changes, making big decisions that can affect their entire futures,” she said. “Our role is to be a support network for them, giving them the correct information and letting them see the path they need to take to reach the finish line.”
In addition to her work advising students, Webb has become a student again herself. She is currently working on a Master of Science degree in educational leadership and policy from Portland State University, with an emphasis in higher education. A former competitive gymnast, Webb is also a coach and co-owner of PEAK Elite Gymnastics Academy, in Corvallis.
Tala Navab-Daneshmand (right) works with graduate student Genevieve Schutzius in the lab.
Environmental engineers have a unique and important role to play in combating the rise of antibiotic resistance, according to a recent high-impact paper published in the journal Environmental Engineering Science.
The paper, representing a consensus of more than 80 environmental engineering and science professors, summarizes the key knowledge gaps and research needed to understand and address environmental sources and pathways of antibiotic resistance, in order to help preserve the effectiveness of antibiotic drugs in treating life-threatening infections.
Tala Navab-Daneshmand, assistant professor of environmental engineering at Oregon State University, is a contributing author of the paper. Her own work looks at the inactivation, growth, and persistence of enteric pathogens from wastewater streams in the environment. Wastewater treatment plants are identified in the paper as one of the critical “environmental hot spots” for priority research.
“One area that remains unknown is the impact of environmental stressors on the fate of enteric antibiotic resistant bacteria in different wastewater treatment systems,” Navab said. “Currently, we are working on a statewide project to identify the impact of seasonal and geographical variations on antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant genes in wastewater treatment facilities across Oregon. Furthermore, we aim to determine the environmental hotspots for the emergence of antibiotic resistance in soils and food crops after wastewater irrigation and biosolids amendment.”
The outcomes of the study are expected to have a positive impact, Navab says, as they will constitute an important early step toward the development of evidence-based policy strategies to decrease the emergence and spread of illness, disability, and death attributable to enteric antibiotic-resistant infections.
The paper, “An Environmental Science and Engineering Framework for Combating Antimicrobial Resistance,” was identified as a “high-impact article” by the publishers. It is accessible online at doi.org/10.1089/ees.2017.0520.
Josefine Fleetwood wants to connect CBEE students with top-tier employers to find meaningful internship experiences — and rewarding jobs after graduation.
Josefine Fleetwood joined the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering this fall as CBEE’s new industry relations coordinator. In that role, her responsibilities cover a wide range of interactions with representatives from companies around the country. But foremost on her agenda is helping to connect students with meaningful internship experiences while they’re here — and rewarding jobs after they graduate.
“That’s what this is all about,” Fleetwood said. “Even with the best education in the world, career success depends on the connections you make and the opportunities you perceive. I want all of our students to be aware of the diversity of great opportunities available to them, and I want to make sure they’re prepared to pursue them with confidence.”
Part of Fleetwood’s plan involves bringing more employers to campus to meet with interested students. This year’s CBEE Fall Career Reception, taking place on Tuesday, Oct. 16 (on the eve of Oregon State University’s 2018 Fall Career Expo), will feature representatives from nine different companies. Students will have the opportunity to attend up to three different “Career Insights” sessions and to interact one-on-one with employer representatives at a networking reception.
An Oregon native, Fleetwood grew up in the Beaverton area and graduated from Portland State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in speech communication. She relocated to North Albany in 1998. In her career, she has coordinated programs and worked with students in K-12 schools, community colleges, and universities on their postsecondary educational and career goals.
Most recently, Fleetwood was the workforce development director for the Albany Area Chamber of Commerce. There, she launched Pipeline To Jobs, an industry-driven K-12 workforce program serving students in the Linn-Benton schools. That award-winning program was recognized by Sen. Jeff Merkley’s office and has received recognition in Oregon and nationwide.
Fleetwood offers individual career counseling appointments by email, and she welcomes CBEE students to drop by her office in 101 Gleeson Hall to introduce themselves. For extra inspiration, Fleetwood offers students a favorite quote, from entrepreneur and philanthropist Richard Branson:
“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes – then learn how to do it later!”
The 2018 class of the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering comprised 185 undergraduates, including 130 who majored in chemical engineering, 42 in bioengineering, and 15 in environmental engineering. (Two students graduated with double majors.) The school awarded 10 master of engineering degrees, 17 master of science degrees, and 16 doctor of philosophy degrees.
The following awards were presented at the school’s graduation celebrations, held June 15 in Corvallis:
Kimberly Compton, the school’s new head advisor, will lead the undergraduate advising team in addition to working directly with students. Compton brings nearly a dozen years of professional experience from Western Oregon University. Compton says she grew into her career there, starting out as a tour guide while still an undergraduate.
Compton earned her bachelor’s degree in health education at Western and began working as an admissions counselor right after graduating in 2006. Motivated by a desire to have more meaningful, long-term interaction with students in helping them to reach their goals, she became an academic advisor in 2012, heading up the pre-nursing advising program. She earned her master’s degree in education from Western in 2016.
Lindsay Wills, academic advisor, is no stranger to Oregon State, having completed a Ph.D. in materials chemistry here in 2017. Since first coming here in 2011, Lindsay has served the university in a variety of different capacities, most recently as program coordinator for the Science Professional Pursuits Program (SP3). Having grown up between Corvallis and Albany, Wills says she hadn’t necessarily planned to stay so close to home, but she’s glad it worked out that way.
“It’s great to work on a campus that really celebrates the beauty of Oregon,” she said.
Both Compton and Wills say they’re eager to start meeting with students and to help them find their way on the path to graduation.
“I think one of the most important things to keep in mind is that we’re not here to be a roadblock to registration,” Compton said. “We encourage students to come in, even when they are not required to. We want to know how students are doing, beyond what classes they’re taking in the next term. We enjoy having those conversations.”
Students can make advising appointments online through the form linked on the CBEE Undergraduate Advising page. Walk-in advising is available daily from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Chemical engineering junior Anthony Pyka likes to build things. As a member of the SAE Beaver Racing team, Anthony took an elective course to get certified to use the campus machine shop, where he occasionally becomes inspired to create extra projects for himself.
One such project was a working model of an oscillating piston steam engine (see video, above), also known as a “wobbler” design. The materials for this project were sourced entirely from the scrap bin.
Pyka presented the engine as a gift to Philip Harding, Linus Pauling Engineer and associate head for undergraduate programs in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering. Harding could not have been more pleased.
“This is a great example of the kind of ‘maker culture’ I want to help build in our school,” Harding said. “It’s tremendously satisfying when students are motivated to create something from scratch, to figure out how something works — and then, when they see it through to completion and everything works? There’s nothing better.”
Kylee Mockler Martens is congratulated by Professor Skip Rochefort at the Global Beavers Gala on May 13, 2018.
Chemical engineering senior Kylee Mockler Martens was honored with a 2017-18 Global Consciousness Award. The award is presented annually to students who are recognized for academic and extracurricular accomplishments that have local and global community impact, connecting their field of study to the rest of the world, and for personal values that exhibit global awareness and involvement.
Mockler Martens will graduate in June with a degree in chemical engineering, the International Degree, and a Spanish minor. Among the highlights of her time at Oregon State, Mockler Martens lists studying abroad in Santander, Spain, acting as conference chair for the Pacific Northwest Regional American Institute of Chemical Engineers Conference, and assisting international students at her campus job at INTO.
Last summer, Mockler Martens completed a 10-week internship in Concepcion, Chile, where she worked on a project involving plastic pyrolysis, which converts waste plastics into fuel. She wrote her International Degree thesis on the full-scale implementation of plastic pyrolysis into Chile’s municipal solid waste management system.
Mockler Martens remains passionate about plastics and the environment, and says she hopes to continue working to improve current plastic recycling systems globally.
“I hope to inspire other OSU students to find ways to improve people’s lives around the world,” she said.
The Global Consciousness Award is presented by the Global Beavers Team, whose stated mission is “to create an informed community of globally minded, diversity-driven students regardless of their place of birth.”
Fully transparent biosensor technology developed at Oregon State University could someday find its way into contact lenses that can monitor blood levels of glucose, therapeutic drugs, or other substances.
New biosensing contact lens technology developed at Oregon State University’s College of Engineering was chosen to receive a 2018 TechConnect National Innovation Award.
The technology, which incorporates an array of fully transparent biosensors within the lens, was developed in the lab of Greg Herman, professor of chemical engineering.
“We can integrate an array of sensors into the lens and also test for other things: stress hormones, uric acid, pressure sensing for glaucoma, and things like that,” Herman said. “We can monitor many compounds in tears – and since the sensor is transparent, it doesn’t obstruct vision.”
The TechConnect Innovation Awards selects the top early-stage innovations from around the world through an industry-review process of the top 20 percent of annually submitted technologies into the TechConnect World Conference. Rankings are based on the potential positive impact the submitted technology will have on a specific industry sector.
A group of 19 CBEE students made the long trip by car to Montana State University for the 2018 AIChE Pacific Northwest Regional Meeting.
The CBEE student chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) sent a delegation of 19 students to the 2018 AIChE Pacific Northwest Student Regional Conference, held April 13 and 14 at Montana State University, in Bozeman.
Traveling in three OSU motor pool vans made for a long weekend, with the students spending about 27 hours at the conference and an equivalent amount of time driving there and back. Nevertheless, the Oregon State contingent was by far the largest group among the schools in attendance, said faculty advisor Skip Rochefort, who accompanied the student group.
“Everyone was great and represented OSU admirably,” Rochefort said. “Our student chapter co-presidents Stephanie Wright, Lauren Tetzloff, and Zia Klocke deserve special thanks for organizing all of the logistics. We would also like to thank the School of CBEE and the College of Engineering for their continued financial support of the CBEE Student Club, which enabled us to send such a formidable group to the conference.”
Bioengineering student Jonathan Su took first place in the poster competition, and pre-bioengineering student Mikayla Heston received an honorable mention.
The CBEE ChemE Car team scored a second-place finish, earning the team its second consecutive trip to the national ChemE Car Competition, to be held Oct. 28-30 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The team was led by co-captains Gillian Williams and Parker Busch. Additional team members were Grant Kresge, Lauren Lippman, and Logan Slayter. Trevor Carlisle is the team’s faculty mentor.
Joseph Danko (M.S. ChemE, 1985) has more than 30 years of experience in consulting, engineering, design, construction management, and operations. He is currently the managing director of city solutions for CH2M (now Jacobs). In this role, he leads development and implementation of projects and programs in resilience, urban development, smart cities, and mobility for cities and communities around the world. In 2007, he was inducted into the Oregon State University College of Engineering’s Academy of Distinguished Engineers.
Question: What are you most proud of in your career as an engineer?
Answer: Making the world a better place through the projects and programs that I have been able to participate in (hazardous waste cleanup, industrial wastewater treatment systems, major site regeneration projects, and large events like Qatar World 2022 World Cup where we developed breakthrough worker welfare standards). Leading the integration of sustainability in planning, engineering and constructing projects.
Q: What do you love best about what you do?
A: Working on projects that make people’s lives better: “Engineering and Meaningfulness.” Trying to integrate social values into all of our infrastructure projects. For example, workforce development to employ the currently underemployed, or unemployed, community members in the communities where we are implementing projects and programs.
Q: What do you most look forward to?
A: From a professional perspective, continuing to develop and implement projects focused on equity, sustainability, and resiliency. We are now integrating real-time data analysis and the IoT with our water and transportation infrastructure to improve safety, reduce non-revenue water losses, break the digital divide, reduce congestion, and increase workforce development. There is no limit to the potential positive impacts engineers can have on improving the environment and enhancing the lives of all people.
Q: Looking back on your time here at Oregon State, what did you do here that has best served you in your professional life?
A: The combined chemical engineering and environmental engineering M.S. degree was a game-changer. It provided such a strong foundation/platform for the engineering work at CH2M Hill. I also connected with colleagues from CH2M Hill during my graduate program. The networking was a key door-opener for me.
Q: What is the best advice you could give to a student just starting out with an engineering degree from Oregon State?
A: Enjoy every phase of your career. It is critical in the early years to immerse yourself in “Technical Implementation in the Real World.” Embrace learning how to plan, design, build, and operate systems. This will provide the foundation for you to become a future technical leader, project manager or business manager.
Cory Simon is interested in how mathematical abstractions at molecular scales can reveal insights into the behavior of materials.
Cory Simon, assistant professor of chemical engineering, says his approach to teaching is informed by his belief that even the simplest of things can be interesting once you understand them.
“I would much rather think about rubber bands than watch sports,” Simon said.“Richard Feynman described rubber as molecular spaghetti. With this molecular picture, you can show through statistical thermodynamics why the tension increases when you heat a rubber band. It’s fascinating.”
Like Feynman, the Nobel physicist and consummate professor, Simon is possessed with a vibrant curiosity. Simon says he hopes to instill that same enthusiasm and excitement in his students.
“I want to convey that, in contrast to stereotypes, engineering isn’t a dry or boring subject.” he said.“In addition to intellectual entertainment, chemical engineering isan incredibly useful way of thinking that can be used to dramatically improve human welfare.”
Simon is particularly interested in how mathematical abstractions at molecular scales can reveal insights into the behavior of materials. His doctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley, involved mathematical and computational modeling of metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, a novel class ofsolid materials with some very useful properties.
The crystal structure of a metal-organic framework called HKUST-1 reveals nano-sized pores that can hold gas molecules in place, like eggs in a carton.
MOFs combine metal ions or clusters with organic linking molecules to form thin-walled molecular lattices with nano-sized pores. Their structure creates a huge surface area enfolded into a tiny volume, enabling MOFs to adsorb large quantities of gas. This property lends MOFs applications for gas storage and separations. Simon has studied MOFs for their ability to store natural gas onboard vehicles for fuel and capture radioactive gases from used nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities.
“An especially exciting feature of MOFs is their modular chemistry,” Simon said.“As designer materials, we can judiciously change the molecular building blocks to synthesize a predetermined MOF structure and target a specific gas molecule. There are millions of different possibilities.” In his research, Simon employs molecular models and simulations to sift through the many possible MOFs and predict which are best for adsorbing different gases.
Metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs, assemble from molecular building blocks, like Tinker Toys.
MOFs get even more interesting when you throw dynamic parts, such as rotating ligands and flexible lattices, into the mix. Part of Simon’s work is in developing simplified models to describe the statistical thermodynamics of how these flexible and dynamic parts interact with gas molecules.
His enthusiasm for MOFs notwithstanding, Simon’s expertise and skills as a theoretician have broad applicability throughout the field of chemical engineering. So he doesn’t feel bound by any particular area of inquiry as he develops his own research program at Oregon State, at least not at this stage in his career.
“I’ve spent stints working in polymers, mathematical biology, computational neuroscience, materials science, and genomics,” Simon said.“I even spent a term working as a data scientist at Stitch Fix, a clothing company in San Francisco. As long as mathematics and computer programming are involved, I’m happy.”
His current projects provide a glimpse into the eclectic nature of his interests.
First, he’s working on a physics-based model to explain the formation and persistence of fairy circles, the mysterious, round patches of barren earth sprinkled throughout the grasslands of Australia and Africa. The circles form a regular pattern, and they shrink and expand depending on how much it rains. Various causes have been suggested for their appearance, including termites and plant toxins. But the problem is still shrouded in uncertainty.
Second, he’s working in collaboration with the Altius Institute of Biomedical Sciences, where he was a fellow in 2017, on developing machine-learning models to make sense of high-throughput genomic assays.
“With such models, we can extract biological insights from large and noisy genomics data sets,” Simon said.“A fundamental understanding of gene regulation will lead to cures for developmental disorders, treatments for cancer, and increases in longevity.”
With such a diverse assortment of intellectual appetites, Simon says he has to be careful to pace himself. He offers the following quote from Jennifer Doudna, CRISPR pioneer and professor of chemistry at Berkeley, describing two different types of scientist:
“One is the type who dives very deeply into one topic for their whole career and they know it better than anybody else in the world. Then there’s the other… where it’s like you’re at a buffet table and you see an interesting thing here and do it for a while, and that connects you to another interesting thing and you take a bit of that.”
In that context, Simon says, he sees himself at a buffet.
Elain Fu, assistant professor of bioengineering, wants to use paper-based devices to help make health care more accessible.
Elain Fu says her passion for research is fueled by a desire to create devices that can have a real impact on global health care delivery.
“I’m very motivated by applications,” said Fu, assistant professor of bioengineering in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University. “I love to do quantitative science, and to design devices. But the main satisfaction I get from my work is that it’s driven by biomedically relevant problems.”
With a background in physics and bioengineering and expertise in building microfluidic sensors, Fu’s current research focus is on creating inexpensive, paper-based tools for diagnosing and monitoring a variety of different health conditions. Such devices are a natural fit for what are known as “low-resource environments” – rural communities in the developing world, battlefields, and other remote locations where medical facilities and personnel aren’t always available. But the devices have the potential for a variety of applications in a wide range of environments.
“The area where I have the most experience is human disease diagnosis,” Fu said. “But there are a lot of different application domains – such as veterinary medicine, environmental monitoring, and military situations – where you might need a sensor that you can use in a setting that doesn’t have trained operators, laboratory facilities, or even electricity. By building the capability of these devices within a more general platform, the hope is that the devices will be useful for many different applications.”
One popular format for a paper-based microfluidic device is the lateral-flow test, its best-known implementation being the home pregnancy test that has been in use for decades. This type of device uses capillary action to move a liquid sample through a strip of porous medium, where it can react with certain chemicals, fixed into designated zones along the strip, to display a visible result.
“The format has many strengths for low-resource settings, so it is used around the world for diagnosing infectious diseases, such as malaria and dengue fever,” Fu said. “The problem is that this type of test is not always sensitive enough or precise enough for a given application. So a lot of work is being done in the paper microfluidics community to take the best aspects of the lateral-flow test and make even better tests.”
What constitutes a “better” test varies, depending on the application. For example, in diagnosing malaria, a better test translates to a test with a lower limit of detection. So engineers can manipulate the fluids on the device, or the signaling molecules within them, to create a higher signal-to-noise ratio and improve performance.
Fu’s previous projects have included tests to detect influenza and malaria. One of her current projects, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Washington, aims to develop an early-detection HIV diagnostic for infants. Testing for HIV in newborns presents special challenges, Fu says, because maternal antibodies inherited in the womb can create interference.
“Those maternal antibodies are good for the infant whose immune system is still developing,” Fu said. “But they can create false positives. The test we’re developing has to have an extra component on the front end to pull out the maternal antibodies, so we have to do a little more work. We’re also pushing for higher sensitivity, because with a lower detection limit, you can hopefully diagnose and begin treatment earlier.”
Another application where paper-based microfluidics shows great promise is in-home monitoring of chronic health conditions. One example is phenylketonuria, or PKU, a genetic disorder in which the body is not able to properly metabolize the amino acid phenylalanine.
“The idea is that people with PKU need to monitor their phenylalanine levels just like people with diabetes need to monitor their glucose levels,” Fu said. “But in the absence of any sort of easy test, they have to go to a clinic to get their blood drawn. Then maybe a week or two later, they get the results. That’s informative on some level, but it doesn’t provide the real-time feedback patients need to effectively change their therapy.”
So, a few years back, Fu embarked on a project to develop a test for phenylalanine monitoring in the home. With support from the National PKU Alliance, she and her students created a working prototype that performed well under lab conditions. But it’s a much higher bar to build something that can perform robustly in somebody’s home, with the patient operating it. Last September, the National Institutes of Health awarded funding to Fu and collaborators at the University of Pittsburgh and Oasis Diagnostics to try to move that device to the next level.
“What we’re trying to do is create a device for people with PKU, so they can take a drop of blood from a finger prick, put it in the device, and then within 10 minutes get their phenylalanine level.” Fu said. “This is where it gets exciting for me, moving from something where you can demonstrate that it works in the lab, to something that people can actually use in their own home.”
The drive to create a home-based phenylalanine test is just one example of a growing trend toward more personalized health care. Fu says this trend has the potential to empower individuals with a variety of different conditions, by providing them with tools for home-based testing and monitoring.
“Technology is moving out of centralized labs and hospitals and becoming more accessible to people for use at the point of care,” Fu said. “This trend can enable the practice of precision health in which differences between individuals can be taken into account in their healthcare. Having one number that you’ve averaged over the population to say what’s normal or not normal – that’s not really meaningful. But if patients could simply test themselves at appropriate times at home or wherever they happen to be, they would be able to map out exactly what is and is not normal for them.”
Fu says she’d ultimately like to see her devices progress far enough to where she can transfer her technology to an industry partner to produce the technology for use by the people who need it.
“What’s meaningful to me, and what drives my research, is the potential for helping people,” she said.
Bioengineering junior Nicole Laschober, a two-time Johnson Intern, presented a poster in October 2017 at the national conference of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Phoenix, Arizona.
Since it was launched in 1998, the Peter and Rosalie Johnson Internship Program has provided paid research opportunities for more than 400 students in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering.
Created at the initiative of chemical engineering alumnus Peter Johnson ’55 and his wife, Rosalie, the program was endowed with a $2.4 million gift in 2008. Each spring, about 25 qualified first-year students are matched with research labs on campus, or with one of Oregon State’s academic partners.
In addition to a good, paid summer job and valuable training on laboratory equipment, Johnson Interns gain confidence and new perspectives from their research experience.
The Johnson program is special, says Professor Skip Rochefort, who administers the program, because there are very few comparable, intensive research opportunities available for students with only one year of schooling under their belts. The experience that Johnson Interns acquire in their first summer can be instrumental in assuring their future success.
“Our students compete nationally for internships and undergraduate research experience programs,” said Rochefort. “To be competitive for these positions, they need to have demonstrated mastery of skills not widely taught or practiced at other schools. This is what the Johnson Internship provides them in the summer following their first year.”
Bleeding for science
Nicole Laschober, a bioengineering junior, has spent the past two summers working at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) in the lab of Owen McCarty, examining the clotting mechanisms at work in blood platelets. From the beginning, she says, it was a hands-on learning experience.
“I was in the lab every day, working with fresh blood,” she said. “Going in, I didn’t realize at all what the job was going to be like. So in retrospect, I guess it’s a good thing I’m not squeamish. The blood I worked with was often my own, so I got to learn a lot about my own platelet count.”
Laschober says her platelet count wasn’t the only thing she learned about herself during her time at OHSU.
“I also figured out that I really enjoy doing research,” she said. “And I like being at a lab bench. That has helped me to focus. I’m thinking I might want to go to graduate school, and I’m looking around at different labs.”
The work Laschober was involved in during her first summer led to publication in a peer-reviewed journal, where she was the third-listed author. And last fall, she presented a research poster at the annual meeting of the Biomedical Engineering Society in Phoenix, Arizona.
Bioengineering sophomore Kendra Jones presents research she did over the summer at OHSU, during the Johnson Interns poster presentation in January at Oregon State University.
Kendra Jones, a bioengineering sophomore, joined Laschober last summer in McCarty’s lab, where she worked on a research project examining the unique properties of platelets in newborn babies. And, just like her fellow student, Jones had the opportunity to shed a little blood for her research. But for her, that wasn’t the scary part, she says.
“I was very nervous going in, just because it was OHSU, and it’s kind of a big deal,” she said. “But there’s really no reason to be nervous. You just need to slow down, and know that you know things. I think my biggest problem was that I was just a first-year student and I felt like I didn’t have enough background in engineering or biology. But you learn on the spot.”
Jones says the experience was a transformative moment in her educational career.
“Looking back, I gained so much confidence in myself,” she said. “I can see how my education lines up with a future career. It was hard to see that before.”
Getting a close-up view of the field
Joe Hebert, now a sophomore in chemical engineering, spent his summer on campus in the lab of Professor Greg Herman. There, he worked alongside another intern, using atomic force microscopy to examine the orientation of a certain type of chemical structure, called beta-Keggin clusters, on a graphite surface. The research has implications for the development of new materials for microprocessors.
Chemical engineering sophomore Joe Hebert presents research he did last summer in the lab of Professor Greg Herman, at the Johnson Interns poster session in January.
Hebert says he had looked at a few scientific papers detailing the standard operating procedures for the instrument, but even just assimilating the required technical vocabulary presented a big challenge up front.
“It was very intimidating — until that first day,” Hebert said. “My partner and I were immediately introduced to the graduate students who took us under their wing. They showed us how to use the equipment and what to watch out for.”
Hebert says he had always envisioned himself focusing on the pharmaceutical side of chemical engineering because of his personal interests and family background. However, his experience with the Johnson program has expanded his horizons.
“It kind of opened my eyes to how broad chemical engineering can be,” he said. “There are so many other fields that are extremely interesting. The doors are wide open.”
Bioengineering with beads
Kelly Hollenbeck, also a sophomore in chemical engineering, worked with bioengineering Assistant Professor Kate Schilke on a project to engineer tiny beads made of bionanoparticles. These beads are coated with various proteins that give rise to different surface properties, making them useful in a host of potential bioengineering and biomedical applications.
Chemical engineering sophomore Kelly Hollenbeck presents research she did last summer in the lab of Assistant Professor Kate Schilke, at the Johnson Interns poster session in January at Oregon State.
The beads Hollenbeck worked with are grown in a type of cell that typically is fed with glucose. Hollenbeck’s project involved growing the cells on an alternative substrate, 1-4, butanediol. Growing the beads was a long process that involved learning a lot of different microbiology techniques, including the use of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Getting time on that equipment is a rare experience for an undergraduate, Hollenbeck said, let alone a first-year student.
“I got so many things out of the experience,” Hollenbeck said. “I learned how to work in a lab environment, individually, with peers, and in groups. I learned how to present my findings, both written and orally. That was a big part of our group, actually. We really had to communicate a lot, because there were so many projects going on at once.”
Hollenbeck says the knowledge she gained over the summer helped to consolidate what she had learned in class during her first year. But more than that, she says, she felt the work she was doing had value beyond what it could do for her.
“I could definitely see how the stuff I was learning in the classroom applied to real-world applications,” she said. “But knowing that I was working on something that was real, and that has the potential to help people — that was a really a cool experience.”
Students attend a Career Insights session at the 2018 CBEE Winter Career Reception.
Career Expo week brings many companies to campus to recruit students for internships and entry-level positions, but smaller events held around campus at this time allow students and industry representatives to connect on a more personal basis. On Feb. 20, the evening before the Career Expo, more than 100 students, 15 industry representatives (including many Oregon State alumni), and CBEE faculty participated in the third annual 2018 CBEE Winter Career Reception at the Memorial Union.
Students attended their choice of three “Career Insights” informational sessions, hosted by industry partners Cascade Pacific Pulp, E. & J. Gallo Winery, Enzymatic Deinking Technologies, Lonza’s Bend Research HQ, Micron Technology, and SLR International. Also participating was Oregon State’s Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and the Arts office, providing information to students about getting started in undergraduate research on campus. This format provides a recruiting and marketing opportunity to companies, while helping students appreciate the myriad career opportunities and diverse industries available to them as new engineers.
A catered networking reception followed the presentations, giving the students, mostly juniors and seniors, more opportunities to connect with industry visitors, also including new CBEE Industry Advisory Board member and Oregon State alumnus Kyle Gee from ThermoFisher Scientific.
The CBEE Club, Oregon State’s AIChE Student Chapter, is instrumental in putting on this event, with the support of the participating companies and the CBEE Corporate Relations office. The work of the CBEE Club’s industry liaison officer, along with CBEE Club member volunteers and corporate event sponsorship, make the event possible.
CBEE-Industry connections are a two-way street that can enhance CBEE academic programs and also help meet industry needs related not only to staffing, but also technology and marketing. We welcome industry involvement with our program. Upcoming opportunities to connect with CBEE students include the May 18 Engineering Undergraduate Expo, which showcases our senior student projects. The next Career Reception will be held in the fall term, on Oct. 16.
Professor Dorthe Wildenschild, left, presents award certificates to Lynza Sprowl, Riley Murnane, and Ross Warner, selected as the top three poster presenters at the College of Engineering’s 2018 Graduate Research Showcase.
Energy storage, clean water, and cryopreservation were the subjects of research posters selected as award recipients from the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at the College of Engineering’s 2018 Graduate Research Showcase held Feb. 8.
A panel of the school’s faculty members selected the top three posters out of a field of more than 30 presentations representing a diverse cross-section of research interests from each of the school’s three main disciplines.
In addition to the recognition of their mentors and peers, winning presenters were invited to attend the 2018 Oregon Stater Awards ceremony on Feb. 22 in Portland, where they had the opportunity to present their research to the College of Engineering’s industry partners and distinguished alumni.
Graduate students Lynza Sprowl, left, and Qin Pang discuss their posters at the 2018 Graduate Research Showcase.
Improving batteries for a clean-energy future
Lynza Sprowl, a fifth-year chemical engineering student in the lab of Líney Árnadóttir, took top honors for her poster discussing how charge state impacts battery life in lithium-ion cells. Sprowl says improving upon this technology will be essential to making a global transition to clean and renewable energy.
“A lot of people are looking at solar panels and wind turbines, and there have been a lot of successes there,” Sprowl said. “But battery technology is the bottleneck. We need better energy storage to supply power when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing.”
When a lithium-ion battery is being charged, energized electrons at the surface of the anode cause the battery’s electrolyte to break down, consuming lithium ions and creating a chemical barrier that slows lithium ion diffusion to the anode.
“When lithium ions can’t reach the anode, you can’t charge the battery fully,” she said. “As the barrier gets thicker, fewer lithium ions remain and the lithium ion diffusion gets slower, until it reaches a point where it stops. At this point the battery lifetime is up.”
Sprowl uses mathematical modeling, specifically something called density functional theory (DFT), to look at the fundamental interactions of how electrolyte breaks down under different conditions.
“With computational studies, you can break down different electrolyte additives, see what products they make, and figure out how those additives match up experimentally with what you think is going to give the best results.”
One of Sprowl’s findings is that it is two times more favorable for the electrolyte to break down when the battery is at a high charge state. And this has immediate, practical implications that anyone can use.
“Basically, if you leave your phone plugged in overnight and it’s at 100 percent charge state for several hours, you’re shortening your battery life,” she said. “So, once it hits 100, take it off the charger.”
Second-year master’s student Riley Murnane presented research on his substrate selection project.
Using bacteria to clean up toxic waste
Riley Murnane, a second-year environmental engineering master’s student working in the lab of Lewis Semprini, took second place for his poster discussing substrate selection for a type of microorganism that shows promise in cleaning up toxic waste spills.
Rhodococcus rhodochrous is a species of soil bacteria that produces enzymes capable of degrading dioxane, a persistent groundwater contaminant, through a process called aerobic co-metabolism.
“The co-metabolism requires a certain substrate to be present,” Murnane said. “And I’m looking at which food-grade, economically viable, and readily available substrates work best in our context for this specific microbe’s enzyme.”
Murnane’s research focuses on a group of aromatic, sweet-smelling compounds called esters as potential substrates.
“The ones we’re looking at are all FDA-approved as food additives,” Murnane said. “For example, we’re working with things like sec-butyl acetate and benzyl acetate, which are used in fruit flavorings because they smell like banana or green apple.”
These esters hydrolyze, or degrade in water, over time to form an alcohol and an organic acid. It’s these end products that are taken up by the microbes, which in turn produce the enzyme that enables co-metabolism to happen.
“The idea is to encapsulate the microorganisms and their food supply into little gel beads that can be pumped into the upper sandy layer of the aquifer to work over time,” Murnane said. “We want the ester to hydrolyze slowly to the substrate that the bugs will use, so that they will continue to metabolize pollutants as they diffuse from the denser, clay layer. So the half-lives of the materials we’re looking at range from 100 to 3,000 days.”
Ross Warner presented his research on mathematical modeling of toxicity in tissue cryopreservation.
Advancing cryopreservation to the next level
Ross Warner, a third-year chemical engineering Ph.D. student working in the lab of Adam Higgins, was awarded third place for his poster concerning a cryopreservation project.
Cryopreservation involves introducing chemicals such as ethylene glycol, better known as antifreeze, into biological specimens to suppress the formation of ice crystals so they can be preserved at very low temperatures.
“Dr. Higgins has done a lot of work at the single-cell level,” Warner said. “We’re at the point now of taking that knowledge gained and trying to advance to the next level of biological complexity. So a lot of my work has been on the theoretical modeling of tissues and organs.”
A major problem with exposing cells to ethylene glycol is toxicity. This problem is accentuated in larger specimens, such as whole organs, Warner says, because their larger volume requires greater cooling time and exposure to higher concentrations of antifreeze.
“If we can model the transport of this given antifreeze into and out of the cell, we can get a grasp of the toxicity it’s imparting,” Warner said. “Through mathematical modeling, we can calculate a given percentage of cell death at different concentrations, temperatures, time of exposure, and so on, and compare that to acceptable tolerances. If we can obtain a model that predicts concentration as a function of space and time we can predict toxicity as a function of space and time.”
Mathematical modeling enables researchers to home in on the type of experiments needed, Warner says, conserving time and resources and accelerating the pace of progress in the field. The research has big implications in the long-term preservation of tissues and organs, which could revolutionize transplant surgery.
“The lifespan of donor organs outside of the body is typically measured in hours,” Warner said. “What if we could extend that to days or weeks? Right now we have a pretty good grasp of blood banks, but what if there were organ banks? We could potentially save a lot of lives.”
Eric MacKender, a 2000 graduate in chemical engineering, was honored at the 2018 Oregon Stater Awards, held Feb. 22 in Portland, where he joined the Council of Early Career Engineers.
MacKender says it was thanks to prompting from his high school chemistry teacher that he became interested in chemical engineering, and he selected Oregon State after being awarded a scholarship and admission to the Honors College.
When it came time to write the thank you letter for the scholarship, he was surprised to learn that there wasn’t anyone to thank. The scholarship was a generous endowment created from the estate of a woman who valued education.
“I always remembered that,” MacKender said, “and I started giving back to Oregon State after graduation. It wasn’t much at first, but slowly it increased over time.”
MacKender, an Honors College graduate, says the program influenced him a great deal.
“The honors program opened my eyes to more than just engineering,” he said, “and I really benefited from the colloquial courses, seeing the passion of my professors, and from the opportunities to learn about many different topics.”
Chevron recruited MacKender directly out of school for its specialty chemical business, and he has worked there for 18 years. In that time, he’s had an opportunity to work in many different parts of the business and see how they are all connected.
“It’s been fun commercializing new chemistry and bringing new products to market,” he said.
The Chevron Oronite plant produces quality additives that improve the performance of fuels and lubricants. As technical manager, MacKender oversees all the engineering functions and the quality control laboratory. MacKender enjoys helping others to thrive.
“I’ve had a chance to lead a lot of great people, mentor them, watch them grow, and help them get promoted to bigger and broader roles. My wife and I both value the importance of education, and we donate our time and money to help others in this way,” he said.
MacKender serves on the Board of Regents, the development advisory group for the Honors College at Oregon State.
Colette Gaona, a 2008 graduate in chemical engineering, was honored at the 2018 Oregon Stater Awards, held Feb. 22 in Portland, where she joined the Council of Early Career Engineers.
Knowing the actual chemistry behind environmental contamination issues is what sets Gaona apart from her colleagues. She is one of just three chemical engineering professionals on Landau Associates’ staff of 92 employees.
“I often get calls when a more technical explanation is needed concerning chemical contaminants,” she said.
In her 9 1/2-year career with Landau Associates, Gaona has conducted a number of field studies that include finding and tracing the pathways of pollutants, evaluating analytical data, preparing technical reports, and developing cleanup recommendations for aerospace, industrial, and public sector facilities.
“I enjoy playing the role of detective in helping our clients solve problems,” she said.
Gaona is now taking it to the next level. Landau Associates is an employee-owned company, and she ran for a seat on the firm’s board of directors in 2016. Now in her second year on the board, she serves as corporate secretary.
“It’s been a great opportunity to learn about the company and the business of my profession from a different perspective,” she said.
Gaona also has stepped into a leadership role in the firm’s Portland office, overseeing larger projects and staff. And she’s accomplished all this while embarking on parenthood — her second child is due in April.
“It’s worked out well,” she said, “I’m learning how to balance and excel in new areas while becoming a mom.”
For students entering the profession, especially women, she offers this advice:
“You don’t have to take the traditional route, but women must have passion if they want to advance in this industry. Excellent mentors and internships provided by the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering prepared me for real-life work. If you don’t take internships, it’s tough to get your foot in the door. Wisdom, education, tenacity, and a little experience help you get noticed.”
Col. (Dr.) Sarady Tan joined the Academy of Distinguished Engineers at the 2018 Oregon Stater Awards ceremony, held Feb. 22 in Portland.
Tan earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering at Oregon State University, in 1988 and 1990, before earning his medical degree from Oregon Health and Science University in 1993.
Today he is director of the National Center for Medical Intelligence within the Defense Intelligence Agency, headquartered in Washington, D.C. He leads a diverse team of military, civilian, and international partners who monitor the medical risk intelligence of foreign adversaries to help the president and national policymakers make informed security decisions.
His impressive 22-year career as a physician and commander in the U.S. Air Force includes eight deployments: to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Qatar. “As an operational flight surgeon, my responsibility has always been to prepare — physically and mentally — the folks who are going to fight on the front lines and make sure they’re fit to go,” Tan said.
Tan came to the United States from Cambodia as a refugee with his family in 1975 during the U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War. He was just 9 years old. In high school, he watched documentaries about the challenges faced by refugees and wanted to do something to serve the underprivileged.
Before Tan started graduate school at Oregon State, his parents gave him a plane ticket to Thailand so he could visit a refugee camp.
“I saw a lot of doctors working there,” Tan said. “When I experienced Doctors Without Borders, I knew I wanted to be a physician.”
Tan also knew he wanted to serve in the U.S. military. His father was formerly in the Cambodian Royal Air Force.
“I wanted to at least serve my adopted country as a way to repay for the second chance in life and opportunities I’d been given living here,” Tan said.
Tan is passionate about educating others about the necessity of giving back to our country.
“It’s about doing something you enjoy,” Tan said. “For me, medicine and serving our country are intricately related. You can say that I am living the American dream.”
Chih-hung Chang, professor of chemical engineering, works with nanostructured thin films and printable electronics, with applications from solar panels to smart textiles.
In the near future, you might be able to charge your smartphone using solar panels printed directly onto your T-shirt, says Oregon State chemical engineering professor Chih-hung Chang.
Perhaps that same shirt will contain sensors that take your temperature or monitor your health by sampling your sweat. Or maybe the fabric will change color to alert you to environmental threats.
“I love coming up with new ideas,” Chang said. “It’s always exciting to try new things.”
Chang is optimistic about the potential for “smart textile” applications like these. An expert in printable electronics, Chang is currently working on a project supported by the Walmart Manufacturing Innovation Foundation that aims to print functional electronic devices directly onto fabrics.
“Right now we’re at the stage where we want to be able to fabricate components onto the fabric, including transistors or solar cells,” Chang said.
The way printable electronics are fabricated is similar to inkjet printing, Chang says. A silicon microfluidic chip dispenses microscopic droplets of different inks with a very high degree of accuracy. Only with this printer, instead of different colored pigment inks, molecular and nanoparticle “inks” function as conductors, semiconductors, and insulators.
“We are working to develop the inks that will be used to print electronics using print-additive techniques,” Chang said. “And we’re looking at energy-efficient curing processes, like microwaves, to make smart textiles.”
Printable electronics are just part of what Chang spends his days on. The majority of Chang’s work, largely funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on using microchemical reactors in the creation of nanomaterials, nanostructures, and thin films.
“We use microreactors as a tool for manufacturing and also for fundamental study,” Chang said. “In the reactor, we generate all sorts of reactive species, including nanoparticles. We send these to a surface, and then they reorganize themselves on the surface to create nanostructured thin films.”
These thin films are used in a variety of applications, including photovoltaic cells, heat-transfer surfaces for electronic devices, and a variety of chemical sensors.
Some of Chang’s recent projects, supported by the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory, have potential applications in carbon sequestration. Chang’s work focused on using organic/inorganic hybrid nanomaterials to capture carbon dioxide, and also using nanomaterials to enhance near-infrared signals for monitoring carbon dioxide.
Chang’s own spinoff company, CSD Nano, developed a process to retrofit solar cells with a nanostructured coating that increases the output from existing solar farms. Chang founded the company in 2007. He currently advises the firm, sits on its board, and serves as its chief science officer.
Another Oregon company, Abom, turned to Chang to help develop its next-generation patented self-defogging ski goggles. Supported by ONAMI, Chang worked with his collaborator, Dr. Rajiv Malhotra, to develop innovative processes used in the defogging technology as well as a proprietary lens coating material.
Developing sustainable processes, by reducing energy consumption and achieving higher material utilization, is a guiding principle in Chang’s work. One major emphasis is developing a scalable manufacturing process for nanomaterials.
“The hope is that by making these processes more efficient, devices will be more cost-effective so they can be commercialized,” Chang said. “We want to get them into the market.”
Chang says he derives great personal satisfaction from his work, and working with students is one of the job’s major perks.
“It keeps your mind fresh, as you get older,” he says. “I think it’s very gratifying to see a student get excited about a project. Once they are motivated, they just do it themselves. In the research area, that’s the part that I like the most. To come up with new ideas and try them out in the lab and working with students.”
When he was himself a student, Chang says he was first drawn to study art, but he ultimately decided on chemical engineering. However, he doesn’t see the two as being mutually exclusive.
“I feel like I still get to do art,” he says. “Lots of people are using smart textiles for artistic expression in T-shirts. For example, you can have lighting or other interesting effects — for fashion, not necessarily for function. As engineers, of course, we care a lot more about function.”
Chang recently found creative inspiration in a collaboration with Sara Robinson, professor of wood science and engineering in College of Forestry. Their project, another Walmart-funded venture, aims to turn biopigments from fungi that grow on wood into printable inks for textiles.
“I actually bought a T-shirt printer, just to play around with,” Chang said. “My idea is that once I have the ink, I can design T-shirts and print them myself.”
CBEE students present senior projects at the 2017 Engineering Undergraduate Expo, outside Johnson Hall.
For students in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering, the senior project represents the crowning achievement of years of determination, work, and study. It also provides those who are about to graduate an opportunity to demonstrate to their mentors, peers, and community just how much they’ve learned.
These projects — undertaken with the supervision of either a faculty mentor or one of the school’s industry partners — require students to tackle real-world challenges using their hard-earned engineering skills and creative problem-solving abilities.
Administered by Philip Harding, Linus Pauling Engineer, the CBEE senior projects are formulated in the fall and assigned in late January. Work begins in mid-February. A listing of this year’s senior projects is now online. (Check back throughout the spring term for links to the teams’ most recent presentations, along with projects from previous years.)
The senior projects culminate in the College of Engineering’s Engineering Undergraduate Expo and final presentations in mid-June.
Each year, the Expo offers an amazing breadth of engineering talent and ingenuity, featuring projects by seniors throughout the College of Engineering. The 2018 event will take place on Friday, May 18, in the Kelley Engineering Center, Johnson Hall and Community Plaza.
Chemical engineering junior Zachery Knudsen says his internship experience confirmed for him that engineering is the right choice, and that industry is where he wants to be.
Zachery Knudsen jokes that he worked in just about every job you can have without going to college before he decided to pursue chemical engineering at Oregon State.
Never afraid of hard work, the 25-year-old junior from Las Vegas tried his hand at all kinds of jobs in construction, as a mechanic, even working in restaurants. But he had yet to find a job he wanted to make a career out of.
Last summer, Zach went to Longview, Washington, to work as an engineering intern at KapStone Paper and Packaging’s huge mill there. From the beginning, he says, his experience there confirmed that he had made the right career choice.
“During the first week, I shadowed one of the full-time engineers,” he said. “One of the dryers wasn’t working properly, and nobody could figure out why. This guy went out there, checked things out, got into the controls, changed a few things — and it started working again. I thought to myself: ‘This is exactly why I got into engineering, to solve problems.’”
In any production environment, there are always problems to be solved. KapStone’s Longview mill is huge, with a footprint of more than 100 acres and a capacity of 1.45 million tons per year. It’s also an older facility, operating on the same site since 1927. The problem Zach worked on isn’t very small or very new either: His work was part of the preparations for an overhaul to the mill’s white water system, a significant plant upgrade that the company has been planning for years.
One of the paper machines at KapStone Paper and Packaging’s mill in Longview, Washington. (Courtesy of KapStone)
On its way to becoming paper, wood pulp is laid out on wire supports that convey it through the mill. The pulp is sprayed with water from showers to keep it manageable and to help the fibers align properly. The wire itself is also sprayed to keep it clean and free of pulp residue. The used shower water, now an opaque waste product called “white water,” drips into a catch basin beneath the wire to be recycled.
Problems arise when pulp fibers suspended in recycled white water become trapped in shower nozzles, clogging them. This results in increased downtime for maintenance and, consequently, reduced production. Unchecked, it can lead to equipment failure and product losses. All of these are unrecoverable costs to the company. Zach’s work focused on two of the five machines running at the mill.
“I worked on understanding how all the water was fed, where the water was going, basically doing a big mass balance/energy balance around the whole machine,” Zach said. “They use WinGems modeling software, pretty much the standard in the pulp and paper industry. They had already built a model of what the white water system looked like. I just made improvements to it, like determining more precisely how much water was really in the system, determining the locations of all of the pumps, and just trying to get the numbers as close as possible to where the machines really are.”
Once that work was done, the team performed an economic analysis and determined that a whitewater filtration project could save the company about $800,000 per year, with a return on investment of 130-150 percent.
Zach says his summer experience gave him an opportunity to put some of his classroom learning to use in the real world.
“I used a lot of the ideas I learned in mass balances and energy balances, process dynamics, and problem solving in general. Eventually, I’ll take process controls, and I got a lot of hands-on exposure to that while I was there, too.”
Spending the summer at KapStone confirmed a few things for Zach. He says he now knows for certain that he wants to be in industry, that he wants to stay on the West Coast, and that he picked the right major.
“I saw what the full-time engineers were doing, and that looked like something I want to be doing,” he said. “After working so many jobs, this reassured me that this is exactly what I want to do.”
Anthony Pyka spent his summer working with MATLAB on a project with the Funai Corporation.
Persistence and stubbornness are the two qualities that Anthony Pyka says drew him to study chemical engineering at Oregon State. They’re also the qualities that served him well last summer, when he was working as an intern with the Funai Corporation. It was an experience that he says was as rewarding as it was challenging.
Anthony worked under the direction of Dr. Manish Giri, an Oregon State alumnus and 2017 inductee in the Council of Outstanding Early Career Engineers. Their project involved building on Funai’s microfluidics technology to create an accurate and portable liquid handling platform.
The underlying technology — using a silicon microfluidic chip to dispense picoliter-scale quantities of liquids with a high degree of accuracy — is familiar to anyone who has seen an inkjet printer in operation. But this technology shows great promise for a wide variety of applications, not just in industrial and consumer printing, but also in biomedical pico-dispensing, and microfluidic modules for lab-on-chip and point-of-care devices as well.
Anthony’s part of the project involved integrating an image validation system. He was given a computer and a USB camera to work with. He chose MATLAB as the scripting language because of its convenient image-processing software packages.
“I thought I knew a lot of MATLAB after being an undergraduate teaching assistant for CBEE’s freshman coding class,” Anthony said. “I was completely wrong. This internship showed me how different components of MATLAB can come together to complete a goal.”
Anthony learned different logging techniques and organizing functions to complete image processing. He says these skills helped his understanding of matrixes and made him more familiar with scripting languages, both important to industry and his own education. As with any learning process, it wasn’t always fun.
“At first it was frustrating to see ‘ERROR’ pop up every time I tried to run a code,” Anthony said. “I would often leave work with my code not working, only to come back again the next day and try something different.”
Eventually, everything worked. After six weeks and 600 lines of code, Anthony had a working system that could scan a print job accurately and send processed data to an executable user interface, so users could examine photos and determine whether a sample was printed to proper specifications.
“In class I had to use MATLAB as a modeling program and as a calculator,” Anthony said. “It was exciting to use MATALB for a practical application. “Maybe now I can build and control something on my own!”
Zhenxing Feng supervises students in his laboratory.
Zhenxing Feng’s research focuses on the chemical processes involved in energy storage and conversion. Specifically, he is interested in developing and improving devices — such as batteries and fuel cells — instrumental in effecting the world’s transition to clean, sustainable, and renewable energy.
An assistant professor in chemical engineering, Feng came to Oregon State in the fall of 2016 after spending three years as a researcher at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research at Argonne National Laboratory. Feng says his science background enables him to have a solid grasp of chemistry at the atomic level, but he derives great satisfaction from applying this knowledge to real-world problems on a human scale.
“I started off studying physics, but I really wanted to see applications,” Feng said. “All the work I am doing has the potential to make changes in everyday life. For example, battery technology has become a hot topic lately because of electric cars. This is an area where small details can create a big impact.”
If you want to build a better battery, Feng says, you first need to understand how it works. A big part of Feng’s work focuses on fundamental studies for elaborating the processes at work in existing technologies to identify potential inefficiencies and areas for improvement.
“We try to do things rationally,” Feng says. “If we know, for example, that a cathode is the bottleneck for the development of next-generation battery, we will identify factors that can improve the cathode performance. The best way to diagnose the device is to ‘see’ what is going on inside it during its operation, which is called in situ operando studies.”
These studies often involve trips to national facilities, such as the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory and Advanced Light source at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where high-flux and bright X-rays are generated to penetrate the working devices (e.g., battery and fuel cells) in a non-destructive way but provide atomic structure and chemical information of materials that researchers are interested in.
“It is like a doctor using a CT scan to examine a patient,” said Feng.
One of Feng’s projects is focused on the development of safe, high-energy-density, lithium-ion batteries with long cycle life for applications both in small electronic devices, such as laptop computers, and in electric cars.
The state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries in today’s electric cars can support a range of only around 100 miles, one-third the range of a typical gasoline-powered car. By using a lithium-conducting thin layer to coat the surface of the battery’s cathode, Feng has improved the energy density more than 30 percent, as the modified cathode can be operated at higher voltage. Furthermore, this improvement elongates the cycle life about two to three times longer than commercial lithium-ion batteries, due to the robust surface protection.
Feng’s research is also looking beyond lithium-ion technologies, including lithium-sulfur batteries, which offer eight times the storage density of current lithium-ion batteries, and solid-state batteries, which eliminate the need for liquid electrolytes and can work under extreme high or low temperatures.
“This could be useful if we want to go to Mars, for example,” Feng said. “However, these advanced technologies have problems in stability and cycle life that will need to be overcome before they can be considered a practical alternative”
In the area of energy conversion, Feng is examining the possibility of using low-cost metal oxides as catalysts in fuel cells to replace precious metals like platinum. A fuel cell is a clean-energy device that uses zero-pollution fuels, hydrogen and oxygen, to generate electricity. Their low efficiency is the key issue that prevents their wide commercialization, and a cost-effective catalyst could be their salvation. Feng is also interested in using catalysts to convert carbon dioxide into useful fuels, which is called the carbon-neutral process.
Feng’s work has received funding support from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research and the Energy Frontier Research Center of the U.S. Department of Energy. He is the current Callahan Faculty Scholar in Chemical Engineering at Oregon State. In 2017, he was named a Scialog Fellow of Research Corporation for Science Advancement, which recently awarded him a grant for his advanced energy storage research.
CBEE junior Madeleine Adams spent the summer after her second year working at the corporate headquarters of W.R. Grace in Columbia, Maryland.
“Solving big problems, installing new systems, and developing new ideas are the reasons I chose to study chemical engineering,” says Madeleine Adams.
The CBEE junior spent last summer doing all of those things, working at the corporate headquarters of W.R. Grace in Columbia, Maryland. While there, she helped to implement a new in-house method to determine the crystalline content in homo-polypropylene. This thermoplastic resin is a key component in a wide variety of products —including Tupperware, laboratory equipment, furniture, and packaging materials.
The method Madeleine worked on replicates the method used by Grace’s Chinese clients. Madeleine worked with a team investigating the correlation between the Chinese method, also the international standard method, and the method provided by Grace, which is actually more widely used in industry.
First, Madeleine translated the procedure from Chinese to English. Then she set up the apparatus and got it running, developing a new standard operating procedure along the way. She conducted a job safety analysis, writing up emergency shutdown procedures and analyzing safety concerns with the procedure. She also gained experience working with other analytical techniques to characterize polymers, including carbon NMR and GPC.
“This summer internship has been amazing, because I had the opportunity to see how research works in an industrial setting,” Madeleine said. “I was also able to directly apply what I had just learned in my polymer science and engineering elective during spring term.”
Madeleine says she especially appreciated the collaborative nature of the work she did at Grace, noting the willingness of the team to answer any questions she might have and never passing up an opportunity to teach her something new.
“This internship has really shown me how fun it is to learn something in class and then see it in action in the real world,” she said.
Leaders in energy storage technology converged on the Oregon State University campus Nov. 5-6 for a symposium to discuss opportunities and challenges for next-generation, large-scale grid energy storage systems in the Pacific Northwest and nationwide.
CBEE Professor Zhenxing Feng gives an introduction to energy storage for undergraduate students at the symposium.
The meeting, which drew more than 80 participants, served as a forum for industry representatives, utility companies, academic and government researchers, and policymakers to discuss energy storage and potential major applications in the region.
“This meeting exceeded our expectations,” said conference chair Zhenxing Feng, assistant professor of chemical engineering in OSU’s College of Engineering. “We are creating new possibilities for collaboration among the leaders in energy storage systems for sustainable energy technologies.”
The symposium was organized by Oregon State with assistance from the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a public/private partnership established by the U.S. Department of Energy in 2012. Presenters included researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Industry representatives from 10 companies were in attendance, including Organo Corporation from Japan, China’s Neware Technology, Nissan North America, and Lebanon, Oregon-based Entek Manufacturing.
An afternoon panel discussion brought together representatives from academia, industry, and national research laboratories.
A poster session showcased work by graduate and undergraduate students from Oregon State University and the University of Washington. Awards went to the top three presenters, all from Oregon State.
Ismael Rodriguez Perez, a graduate student in chemistry, received the top honor and a check for $250 for “Pure Hydrocarbon Cathodes for Dual-Ion Batteries – A Trend.” Justin Tran, a recent chemical engineering and sustainability graduate, took home second place ($150) for “Incorporation of Polymorphic Spacers to Inhibit Sintering of SrO/SrCO3 for Thermochemical Energy Storage.” Kofi Oware Sarfo, a graduate student in chemical engineering, was awarded third place ($100) for “Investigation of γ-Al2O3 Surface and Interface with Pt(111) Using Density Functional Theory.”
Members of the CBEE contingent wore their finest Beaver Orange and black to a Halloween celebration during the 2017 AIChE Student Conference in Minneapolis.
A contingent of 16 CBEE students attended 2017 AIChE Student Conference, held Oct. 27-30 in Minneapolis. The CBEE chapter once again volunteered to help run the meeting as a co-host chapter. AIChE national staff said they “love” our students, who have developed a well-earned reputation for being reliable, professional, and pleasant in carrying out their volunteer assignments.
National Awards
Freshman Outstanding Student Award: Joseph Hebert (sophomore, chemical engineering)
Sophomore Outstanding Student Award: Monika Hoke (junior, chemical engineering)
Othmer Oustanding Senior Scholarship ($1,000): Silvia Colussi-Pelaez (senior, chemical engineering and environmental engineering)
ChemE Car Team
The CBEE ChemE Car Team (first place at the PNW regionals) came in a respectable 15th place out of 40 teams.
CBEE pulled off a remarkable recovery after its car received “no distance” in the first run (car went out of track and didn’t stop) because its iodine clock-stopping reaction didn’t work. The team went back to their work table and experimented for the hour between runs, coming back to land within 1.8 meters of the 23.5-meter total distance. Of the 14 cars with “no distance” in the first run, the OSU team came back with the very best second run.
“That’s great engineering problem solving and great teamwork,” said Professor Skip Rochefort, who accompanied the team “It was fun to watch them go through this process and even more fun to see them succeed.”
The team, led by co-captains Gillian Williams and Parker Busch, included Grant Kresge, Logan Slater, Ben Appleby, and Jasper Limon.
Undergraduate Poster Presentations
Six CBEE students presented poster, and two won awards out of more than 300 undergraduate student posters.
Conor Harris (senior, chemical engineering). Faculty mentors: Walker and Rochefort. Third Place, Materials Engineering
Griffin Drake (junior, chemical engineering). 2017 UMaine Summer REU Program. Second Place, Bioprocess
Ben Appleby (senior, chemical engineering, and member of ChemE Car Team) Faculty mentors: Walker and Rochefort.
Kendra Jones (sophomore, bioengineering, first-year Johnson Intern). Faculty mentor: Owen McCarty (OHSU)
Gillian Williams (sophomore, bioengineering, and member of ChemE Car Team). Faculty mentors: Lew Semprini and Mohammed Azzizian.
Tala Navab-Daneshmand, right, works with undergraduate student Gabi Garza in the greenhouse.
Tala Navab-Daneshmand has made a career out of wastewater sludge.
“I sometimes joke that I am ‘The Poop Scientist,’” Navab says. “But it’s an accurate description.”
An assistant professor of environmental engineering, Navab examines the persistence and growth of enteric pathogens from wastewater in the environment, with an eye toward designing better treatment and handling processes. Enteric pathogens – including viruses, bacteria like E. coli, and other microorganisms – are a leading cause of diarrheal disease, which kills more than a half-million children each year, according to the World Health Organization.
After wastewater is treated, the resulting sludge may be further treated to become “biosolids,” used as fertilizer in agriculture. So, Navab follows pathogens in these biosolids from the wastewater treatment plants to their receiving environments, to see whether they end up in crops that are harvested and, ultimately, whether they end up on our plates.
She also follows enteric pathogens in low-income settings in the developing world, tracing their paths through water and soil, onto hands or food crops, and into homes and kitchens, to see how they are transmitted within these environments, with a focus on preventing diarrheal disease.
Originally from Iran, Navab was trained as a civil engineer, working on dam construction and hydropower plants in Tehran before pursuing a master’s degree in environmental engineering. That’s when she discovered her passion for pathogens. Prior to that, she says, she had zero interest in biology, which she remembers as her least favorite course in high school.
“I think I can say I hated it,” Navab says. “And then I took this microbiology course during my master’s, and it was so interesting to me. All these bacteria and microorganisms, I just loved them, so I studied them more.”
Navab went on to earn her Ph.D. from McGill University in Montreal, examining the inactivation of bacterial pathogens through de-watering of biosolids. She then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Eawag Water Research Institute in Switzerland, where field projects took her to Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
Today, Navab’s work looks mostly at E. coli, which is a reliable indicator of fecal contamination when evaluating water for microbiological quality. Her research focuses in particular on a phenomenon called regrowth.
“This doesn’t happen with viruses. If you kill viruses, they’re done,” Navab says. “But with bacteria, you can kill them – you think you’ve killed them – but they can grow back. And there are many different reasons why they grow back.”
For example, biosolids applied to agricultural fields have to meet certain standards for microbiological quality. However, Navab says, testing of biosolids at the treatment plant won’t necessarily ensure that biosolids will still meet those standards weeks or months later, when they are applied to the soil.
“The reason is these bacteria have food available,” Navab says. “And then, depending on many other environmental conditions – moisture content, temperature, pH, all these different things – they can grow back. Even with standards defined for the time of application, what happens to these microorganisms when they are in the soil?”
A specific area of interest for Navab is the persistence and regrowth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These so-called superbugs pose a vexing challenge in the fight against infectious disease because they are immune to the front-line treatments health professionals have come to rely upon.
“This is a newer field,” Navab says. “There are no regulations specifically concerning antibiotic-resistant bacteria in biosolids for land application. We also are not quite sure of how they impact human health. We know that getting infected by antibiotic-resistant bacteria is not good. But we don’t know how they are transmitted to humans.”
One current project, undertaken in collaboration with Joy Waite-Cusic in the Department of Food Science and Technology, is looking at the application of either biosolids or of non-traditional sources of water for irrigation in agriculture. The project will examine whether antibiotic-resistant bacteria are introduced to the field through either of these sources, how these bacteria persist in the soil during the growth season, and whether they end up on crops (farm to fork).
The first step involves little pots of basil growing in a greenhouse on campus. The plants have been set up in different control groups and test groups, some using wastewater sludge as a fertilizer, and some inoculated separately with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Samples taken during the growth season and of the finished crop will be analyzed in the lab to quantify antibiotic-resistant bacteria, using culture-based techniques and molecular methods.
Another project is looking at septic sludge in residential households in Vietnam, where 80 percent of households have septic tanks. For the most part, the sludge from these tanks is disposed of without treatment, directly into some sort of receiving environment – landfill, surface water, fish ponds, or agricultural fields. Navab and her collaborator in Vietnam, Mi Nguyen, will examine if pathogens from wastewater sludge end up in agricultural crops or in the flesh of fish consumed by humans, or if there is a risk to children who swim in contaminated water.
“If that’s the case, we can look at using a treatment process that is appropriate, economical, and practical for that setting,” Navab says. “We have been talking about, for example, anaerobic digestion, but then first we have to figure out what exactly is the situation.”
The issues surrounding safe food and water go beyond wastewater treatment and include economic and cultural factors such as education, sanitation, and handwashing practices. Navab warns against the appeal a technological quick fix or a one-size-fits-all solution.
“As engineers alone, I don’t think we can solve the problem,” Navab says. “People from different fields need to work together, and this is where interdisciplinary work really matters. People from many different fields – social sciences, engineering, public health, medicine – should come together and try to understand the problem, the culture, the community, and then define interventions that work for that specific society.”
The first step involves little pots of basil growing in a greenhouse on campus. The plants have been set up in different control groups and test groups, some using wastewater sludge as a fertilizer, and some inoculated separately with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Samples taken during the growth season and of the finished crop will be analyzed in the lab to quantify antibiotic-resistant bacteria, using culture-based techniques and molecular methods.