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A roundup of chemical and biological engineering students who won prestigious awards and honors this semester.

Professor Ryan Hayward has witnessed the continued advancement of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering since he joined ²ÊÃñ±¦µä four years ago. Now he’s looking forward to stepping into his new role as department chair.

Professor Will Medlin, department chair of chemical and biological engineering, received a four-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation award to study new routes for converting biomass into renewable fuels and chemicals.

With the spring semester ending soon, I am grateful for our students, faculty and staff who helped make our return to campus this past academic year a success. All throughout the fall and spring, we found success and fellowship in our classrooms and research labs, returning to safe and productive in-person experiences that we will never take for granted again.

²ÊÃñ±¦µä’s East Campus is now home to the High-Sensitivity Low-Energy Ion Scattering (HS-LEIS) Spectrometer, a tool researchers from across the Rocky Mountain region will use for advanced materials characterization and analysis.

We had a good fall semester.

That seems like a simple statement, but it means a lot, considering the events of the past year and a half. It is worth remarking upon as ²ÊÃñ±¦µä returned to full-time, on-campus operations.

Alumni and friends of the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering generously made contributions to the department excellence fund in honor of Giving Tuesday. Nineteen donors provided $3,018 during the giving period, which ran throughout the latter half of November.

The proliferation of plastic products has created an environmental challenge: what should be done with unusable, discarded plastic waste that can harm the environment? Faculty from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering are working on a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project, Hydrogenolysis for Upcycling of Polyesters and Mixed Plastics, to address this serious environmental issue.