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Chairman's Corner
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The University of Florida is a very dynamic place these days. In
addition to a new Provost (a biomedical engineer) and a new football
coach - the Department of Chemical Engineering has had quite a lot of
activity also.
UF is already the 4th largest university in the country and continues to
grow, paralleling the huge growth in the state of Florida. In Chemical
Engineering, UF is the 6th largest producer of PhD graduates and the 8th
largest producer of BS graduates in the country (C&E News, February 7,
2005 issue). As a part of this growth, the Chemical Engineering
Department has added four new faculty members in 2005. These four new
members are outstanding additions to our department - bringing the
number of faculty who are engaged in research/teaching up to 24. These
four new faculty members and their research are featured in this issue
of the alumni newsletter. We are also in the process of hiring one or
two more faculty members in the next several years.
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This new faculty hiring has created a need for more
space for state-of-the-art teaching and research facilities. Plans are
underway for a building addition which will be connected to our current
building. The planned building addition will face Center Drive and share
a common courtyard with the New Engineering Building. You will be
hearing more about this building addition soon.
This past year we held two alumni receptions in the department - one
before the 2005 Orange and Blue Game and one in the fall before the
Louisiana Tech football game. We also hosted a very successful Chemical
Engineering Alumni Reunion this past summer which you will read about in
this newsletter. We hope you will be able to attend the next Chemical
Engineering Department alumni reception which will be held right before
the 2006 Orange and Blue Game on April 22, 2006.
Our department also hosted the first Shah Annual Lecture in Surface
Science on August 25, 2005. This new annual lecture series was made
possible by a very generous gift to the department by Professor Shah.
The first lecturer was Professor Darsh Wasan, Chaired Professor of
Chemical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology and
member of the National Academy of Engineering. The title of his talk was
"Fluid-Particle Systems: Particle Suspensions, Foams and Thin Colloidal
Films". A banquet was also held in honor of Professor Wasan that
evening.
The quality of our students continues to increase year after year. I
hope you caught the information in our last alumni newsletter indicating
that we have 26 National Merit Scholars in our department alone and UF
leads public universities nationally in the number of National Merit
Scholars (2nd only behind Harvard for all universities - both public and
private). The average SAT of our chemical engineering undergraduates is
1310 and their average high school GPA is 3.92. These statistics are
outstanding! We all have a lot to be proud of.
The fall issue of the Florida Engineer featured our Chemical Engineering
Department. I hope you got a chance to read the numerous articles about
our energetic and creative faculty and their research and teaching
activities. Please let me know if you did not receive a copy of the
Florida Engineer and we will make sure you get a copy.
In summary, it has been a very exciting year for the Chemical
Engineering Department here at UF. It's great to be a ChE GATOR!
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