Letter from the Chairman

Dear friends and supporters of USC Chemical Engineering:

Thank you for visiting our department via this web site. We all take great pride in our education and research programs, and invite prospective students, parents, and alumni to visit us in person!

This past year, our incoming undergraduate class was 41 students with an average SAT 0f 1290. At the graduate level, we enrolled 16 new students in the fall of 2005. We graduated 11 PhD students in 2004 and 8 students in 2005, placing us among the top 25 departments in the country in terms of PhD graduates. Also, our total research expenditures for the year placed us 19^th among Chemical Engineering Departments nationally, according to the annual report prepared by the National Science Foundation. Our undergraduate and graduate students are achieving considerable success, both as individuals as well as teams. Our Kathryn Johnson was named a Goldwater Fellow, while Karen Wigal, Jason Owens, and John Bedenbaugh were winners of Tau Beta Pi Fellowships.

Chemical Engineering is in the middle of all of the major university initiatives, including Future Fuels, Nanotechnology, Biomedical Research, and Undergraduate Research. We continue to operate the NSF Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Fuel Cells, which now has over 15 industrial members. We have received major grants from DoD and DOE in the areas of solid oxide fuel cells, hydrogen storage, and polymer nanocomposites, to list just a few. One of the biggest changes this year came in the area of biomedical engineering. We received approval in March 2006 to begin offering B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Biomedical Engineering, in a partnership with Mechanical Engineering and the School of Medicine.  We welcomed our first class of 27 B.S. students this fall, and they are now enrolled in their first course, BMEN 101, Professional Development and Ethics for Biomedical Engineers.

Dr. Branko Popov was named a Carolina Distinguished Professor, a high honor indeed. This year, Professor John Weidner won the university's Golden Key Award for Creative Integration of Research and Undergraduate Teaching. We are about to retire this award; John joins a long line of winners including Vince Van Brunt, Michael Amiridis, Chris Williams, and Mike Matthews. Professor Ed Gatzke was named an Associate Editor for Automatica.

Friends and alumni will want to note that Professor Joseph Gibbons retired at the end of May 2006, after 42 years of teaching at the University of South Carolina. He stepped down as the longest-serving faculty member on the entire campus! Joe's office is still on the third floor and he is still active in development and alumni relations. I invite you back to campus to visit with him!

We are embarking on a program to increase our visibility by putting a new and personal face on the profession of chemical engineering. I invite you to watch for changes and great accomplishments. As always, we are indebted to you, our alumni and friends, for your support. We welcome your suggestions and guidance.

With appreciation,

Mike Matthews
Professor and Chair