Summer 2005

Incentive Grant Helps Chemical Engineering

While the name may proclaim it’s a Faculty Success Grant, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology chemical engineering students will be the ones reaping the benefits of a new initiative to develop an undergraduate computational research program.

Starting this summer, a pilot program by chemical engineering professors David Miller, Sharon Sauer and Dan Coronell will provide students with an opportunity to pursue open-ended computational research projects in important, cutting-edge areas of chemical engineering. The program will enable students to be better prepared for both graduate school and careers in high tech industries. In addition, it will enhance the opportunities for collaboration with students and faculty from the mathematics, computer science, physics and chemistry departments.

Development of the new educational program is being supported by the Lilly Endowment Inc.’s Initiative to Recruit and Retain Intellectual Capital for Indiana Higher Education Institutions. Rose-Hulman received a $1 million grant in 2004 to help young faculty by providing them with substantial funding to implement innovative projects to enhance undergraduate education at the college. Faculty Success Grants will be awarded to creative education initiatives, which could include the creation of new laboratories, course development or the authoring of innovative teaching materials, according to Art Western, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty. A total of $100,000 was awarded to the program outlined by the three enterprising chemical engineering professors.

Computer-based “experimentation” is becoming increasingly important in the chemical industry, according to Miller (Chemistry, ’90). The need to reduce costs and increase the speed of innovation requires that expensive and time consuming trial-and-error laboratory experimentation be augmented by a number of computational techniques. The American Chemical Society’s Vision 2020 report indicates that increasing and improving the capability to model and predict the behavior of chemicals and chemical systems is one of the most important areas for continued success of the U.S. chemical industry.

Presently, opportunities for undergraduate students to pursue independent research projects with faculty members in Rose-Hulman’s Department of Chemical Engineering are limited. This is largely due to the significant time required for students to establish a requisite understanding of some specialized area. In computational research, a significant amount of this groundwork is comprised of the actual programming.

“We believe that the learning curve for computationally-based research projects can be significantly reduced by developing a common, modular infrastructure of tested, well-documented, and reusable computer code," Coronell states.

Over the course of the program, students and faculty will collaboratively work on research projects while at the same time taking the computer code and transforming it into reusable modules that can be used by future undergraduate research students. This will eliminate a significant amount of the overhead required when a new student starts a project. The structure of the code and algorithms will also provide a format so that new students can immediately begin where another student left off.

“By making the framework common among several faculty members in the department, students will be able to more readily explore research activities in a variety of areas,” Sauer observed. This summer, one graduate student and one undergraduate student are the charter participants in the program, with an additional nine undergraduate students expected to join the effort this academic year and next summer. It is anticipated that the pilot version of the formalized undergraduate research program will be initiated during the 2006-07 academic year.

The Department of Chemical Engineering is in the midst of reviewing the entire curriculum. One common sentiment that has evolved from this review is to allow more opportunities for students to work on independent, open-ended projects. Feedback from the students also indicates that such a program would be well-received.

“We believe the infrastructure developed through this program will support ongoing opportunities for undergraduate students as well as serve as a model for a broader, formalized research option within the department,” Miller said.