• Department Adopts New Name • Faculty Article on Ionic Liquids Named One of Most Cited Papers in Engineering Department Adopts New Name In order to better reflect the growth of molecular biology as one of the fundamentals of its research program and undergraduate curriculum, the Department of Chemical Engineering has changed its name to the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. As a result, it joins the ranks of departments at institutions such as the University of Illinois and Cornell University, who have recently made similar name changes. Mark J. McCready, professor and chair of the department, stresses that the department has not abandoned its commitment to traditional chemical engineering. In fact, he credits the understanding and use of traditional chemical engineering principles with the department’s ability to offer fundamental knowledge in biomolecular engineering. “Engineering continually progresses,” he says. “This particular ‘change’ is part of the ‘directed evolution’ of the field, one that promises exciting developments in the near future.” For more than 100 years chemical engineers have been the people who have designed the processes and created the materials society has needed. Originally working with small inorganic and organic molecules and later with polymers, chemical engineers have developed design and analysis techniques that combine a fundamental understanding of chemicals with sophisticated mathematical tools, enabling researchers to accurately describe matter from molecular and nanoscales up to the macroscopic dimensions necessary for commodity production. They have made major contributions to the fabrication of electronic devices, the creation of selective catalysts through nanoscale synthesis, and the production of chemicals and pharmaceuticals using fermentation processes. Today, because of this unique perspective, chemical engineers are becoming leaders in “bio” fields such as tissue engineering, metabolic engineering, and drug delivery. “Although we’re starting activities in the biomolecular area later than some institutions, we have already made significant strides in our research programs, particularly in the areas of drug delivery, biosensors, and nanotechnologies,” says McCready. “We’re also one of the first engineering programs to develop undergraduate curricula that offers significant life science content integrated throughout the curriculum.” For information on the biomolecular activities and curricula within the department, visit http://www.nd.edu/~chegdept/Bioengineering.html and http://www.nd.edu/~chegdept/Undergrad_Curricula.html. [back to top] Faculty Article on Ionic Liquids Named One of Most Cited Papers in Engineering The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) has named an article by Joan F. Brennecke, the Keating-Crawford Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, as one of the most cited papers in the field of engineering. Titled “Recovery of Organic Products from Ionic Liquids Using Supercritical Carbon Dioxide” and co-written with Lynnette A. Blanchard, the article was published in the January 2001 issue of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, a journal of the American Chemical Society. Blanchard, who received her bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1995 and her doctorate in chemical engineering from Notre Dame in 2000, is a senior process engineer at Intel Corporation in Boston. She works on Pentium 4 and Centrino Mobile Technology products. ISI featured this and other select articles on a special topics Web site during May 2003. All featured articles were reviewed by ISI’s Essential Science Indicators database. The institute is also surveying each of the authors to gather more info on the papers and their potential impact on engineering and society. For more information on Brennecke’s article, visit http://esi-topics.com under the heading “New Hot Papers.” For more information on Brennecke’s work to develop environmentally friendly chemical design processes, visit http://www.nd.edu/~chegdept/Brennecke.html. [back to top]