Messenger - Vol. 1, No. 1, Page 12
Fall 1991
Chemical engineers amass awards

     The recent addition of an eighth Presidential Young Investigator
and two other prestigious faculty awards have affirmed the position of
the Department of Chemical Engineering as one of the nation's elite.
     In June,  Norman J. Wagner, assistant professor, became the
eighth member of the chemical engineering faculty to receive the
prestigious National Science Foundation's Presidential Young
Investigator award. No other chemical engineering department in the
country has had more winners of the five-year award.
     Designed to help universities attract and retain outstanding
young researchers, the NSF award carries an annual base grant of
$25,000. In addition, up to $37,500 is available to match
contributions from industrial sources, bringing the possible total to
$1 million per year.
     Wagner, who joined the University faculty in January, holds a
doctorate from Princeton University. His research interests focus on
the flow and structure of multi-phase materials, such as liquid
crystal polymers and colloidal fluids. His goal is to understand the
microscopic behavior of these complex fluids so that engineers may
ultimately control their larger structure to produce new and
interesting materials.
     Two other chemical engineering faculty members received national
recognition this year. Mark A. Barteau, professor of chemical
engineering and chemistry, will receive the Allan P. Colburn Award for
excellence in publications in November from the American Institute of
Chemical Engineers. And Anthony Beris, associate professor of chemical
engineering, received a Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award for
initiating new courses in computer engineering at both the graduate
and advanced undergraduate level.
     Barteau's pioneering work on the surface reactivity of metal
oxides was cited in his nomination for the Colburn award. He has
published more than 65 publications, the first half of which have
generated more than 1,000 citations in books and journals.
     Established in 1945 and named for the central figure largely
responsible for the rapid development of chemical engineering at the
University, the Colburn award was presented to Arthur Metzner, H.
Fletcher Brown Professor of Chemical Engineering, in 1958.
     Beris was presented his award in June by the Middle Atlantic
Section of the American Society for Engineering Education for his
contributions to teaching and research in the areas of applied
mathematics, modeling, numerical methods and parallel computing.