The Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at Urbana-Champaign is one of two departments in the School of Chemical Sciences, which in turn is part of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The Department is also closely allied with the College of Engineering. Degrees are offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Approximately eighty bachelor's degrees, twenty master's degrees, and fifteen doctoral degrees are awarded annually. The undergraduate program has been fully accredited for many decades by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology.
In accordance with the Department's mission, our undergraduate program seeks to provide a broad-based education in chemical engineering and related fields for highly qualified undergraduates. We continuously review and evaluate our program, checking to see whether our program objectives indeed lead to the desired outcome of preparing our undergraduates with the appropriate skills to be successful in their future careers.
The undergraduate program in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering is among the best in the country. This ranking is based on the eminence and record of achievement of chemical engineers who received their undergraduate education at Urbana-Champaign. Various rankings of graduate programs have consistently rated the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Urbana-Champaign as one of the top dozen in the country.
This excellence is possible because of the high quality and activity of the staff. All faculty members teach both graduate and undergraduate courses. Several of the faculty have won awards for excellence in undergraduate teaching. The faculty also conduct state-of-the-art research programs and publish many research papers. All have received national and international awards for their work and have held offices in national and international engineering societies. Four of our twenty faculty members have the high honor of having been elected to the National Academy of Engineers and/or National Academy of Sciences.
Some current areas of research activity include nanotechnology, biomolecular engineering, biotechnology, tissue engineering, microreactors, fluid dynamics, transport phenomena, colloid and interfacial science, optimization and design, applied mathematics, electrochemical engineering, polymer science and engineering, kinetics and catalysis, and semiconductors. Each year several undergraduates get involved in these research activities by participating in our senior thesis program or other independent study courses, or by obtaining part-time employment in our research labs.
The Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering occupies 50,000 square feet in Roger Adams Laboratory and 9,500 square feet in Davenport Hall; the space is used for both instruction and research. The undergraduate unit operations laboratory occupies the ground floor of Roger Adams Lab, with an opening to the top floor for distillation tower and other tall equipment. These and other experimental units in the laboratory, such as reactors, heat exchangers, evaporators, absorption towers, and apparatus for the study of Newtonian and Non-Newtonian fluid flow are used by seniors in conjunction with their course work. Facilities for undergraduate projects are located in the projects laboratory on the first floor; here all undergraduates' work on individual problems similar to those they might encounter in industry. Ample space is available here for equipment to be designed and built by students. A wide variety of computer hardware and software is available in the department and on campus, and is used throughout the curriculum. The Department operates a computer lab, with dozens of microcomputers. Students use these for on-line data acquisition and digital control, for chemical process simulation, and for several other applications in various courses. In addition, all facilities of the School of Chemical Sciences are available to students, including the storerooms, the electronics, glassblowing, and machine shops, the molecular spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy, and microanalytical laboratories, the computer center, and the new school library.
