Chemical engineering welcomes Sean Palecek

Sean P. Palecek (28K JPG)

This fall, the department welcomed Wisconsin native Sean Palecek to the faculty as assistant professor. Sean received his BS with distinction from the University of Delaware, majoring in chemical engineering with a minor in biology. Sean demonstrated his talent for research as an undergraduate, publishing three peer-reviewed manuscripts as lead author based on his senior thesis project with chemical engineering pro-fessor Andrew Zydney. He began his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Doug Lauffenburger in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Alan Horwitz in the Department of Cell and Structural Biology. When Lauffenburger moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology, Sean followed him there, continuing his collaboration with Horwitz, and completing his PhD at MIT. Among other accomplishments while at MIT, Sean published research results in the prestigious journal Nature demonstrating the merit of using the methods of molecular cell biology to vary parameters for experimental testing of predictions based on engineering models of cell function.

For the past two years, Sean served as a postdoctoral associate with Stephen Kron in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago. His work there will help in understanding how to combat infections caused by pathogenic fungi and to enhance fermentation or remediation of solid substrates. In the Kron lab, Sean learned the molecular biology techniques for modifying the genetic makeup of yeast cells that he plans to use in his research at Wisconsin.

Sean will teach a variety of core chemical engineering courses. He particularly looks forward to developing a new course to introduce upper-level undergraduates and graduate students to the ways in which biological systems can be modeled mathematically, and to how these models, coupled with the tools and approaches of molecular biology, can be used to alter biological function at the molecular, cellular and tissue levels.