MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR
 roviding students with an outstanding education that is rooted in fundamental principles, while staying relevant to a changing world requires constant innovation.
In this issue, we present our new sophomore-level course on chemical process modeling, CBE 255. Spearheaded by Jim Rawlings, this course introduces incoming students to computational modeling in a way that connects mathematical concepts to real chemical engineering problems. The highly interactive course incorporates “peer instruction,” with more senior undergraduate students who have already taken the course serving as teaching assistants. This reinforces the concepts for the students serving as teaching assistants, while the younger students taking the course benefit from close interaction with students who are applying the concepts and tools in their other coursework. Given the success of this approach with CBE 255, we are looking at expanding it to a number of other courses in the curriculum.
A second article in this issue focuses on the Delta program, which engages faculty and graduate students interested in becoming faculty in improving their skills as instructors. UW-Madison is the base for this unique program, which will help us to maintain our long and strong tradition of producing PhD graduates who go on to distinguished academic careers.
"The department is committed to providing our students with the opportunities that will …allow them to move into leadership roles where they’ll use their engineering talent and education to move our economy and our society forward.”
Among other new instructional initiatives, we are developing a version of CBE 250, Process Synthesis (which you may remember in its earlier incarnation as ChE 210, Chemical Process Calculations) that students can take remotely using a web interface, with the primary goal of easing the path of students who wish to transfer to Madison from other campuses. In a related activity, we are moving some lectures to an online format to increase student flexibility and to shift the time that faculty spend with students from large lectures to smaller, more interactive problem-solving and laboratory sections. Speaking of laboratories, our undergraduate lab director Eric Codner has developed a course on chemical engineering instrumentation that is rapidly becoming popular with both undergraduate and graduate students.
Many of our undergraduate students are interested in taking courses that are relevant to many professional careers, but not part of a traditional engineering curriculum. To encourage exploration of other disciplines, we have implemented a professional breath requirement. (For fans of electric circuits, I’m sorry to say that we eliminated that course as a requirement.) This allows students to take additional courses in science and engineering disciplines (including circuits) if they wish, or alternately, to take courses in business, economics, ethics, entrepreneurship and other areas that are not necessarily technical but are nevertheless appropriate for a well-educated engineer. We think that this change increases our ability educate future engineering leaders in a broad sense. (As a side note on leadership, executive recruitment company SpencerStuart recently reported that UW-Madison is tied with Harvard for having the most undergraduate alumni (13) who are Fortune 500 CEOs.)
Research is central to the mission of the department and university, and the under-graduate experience here is enriched by the fact that UW-Madison is a leading research institution. Undergraduate students have not only the opportunity to learn from leading researchers in the classroom, but also to join them in the lab to start down the path of becoming leading researchers themselves. This semester alone, more than 40 undergraduate students are performing research in the laboratories of the department’s faculty, and five (out of 85 for the entire campus) were recently awarded the highly competitive Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Award. These students wrote research proposals for work they will perform this coming academic year in collaboration with CBE faculty, and will present their results next spring at the UW-Madison undergraduate research symposium. For students like these, with a strong interest in research and potentially in graduate school, we have recently created an honors-in-research program within the undergraduate curriculum that includes multiple semesters of research, and culminates in an undergraduate thesis.
The current economic environment is challenging for everyone, particularly our new graduates. With these new educational initiatives, with others instituted in the recent past and still others on the drawing board, the department is committed to providing our students with the opportunities that will make them outstanding engineers and allow them to move into leadership roles where they will use their engineering talent and education to move our economy and our society forward. ON WISCONSIN!
Sincerely,
Michael D. Graham,
Harvey D. Spangler Professor and Chair
2020 Engineering Hall
1415 Engineering Dr.
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: 608/262-1092
Fax: 608/262-5434
E-mail: che@che.wisc.edu
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