Forming bonds between chemical and sustainability engineering

The field of chemical engineering is central to delivering affordable, reliable, and secure technologies with lower impacts on air, water, land, and communities. With sustainability now a major focus of the discipline, the University of Rochester’s 110-year-old chemical engineering department recently changed its name to the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering.

Professor Darren Lipomi, chair of the department, says retitling the department is important to communicate the department’s faculty and students are forward-thinking and focused on developing solutions to meet growing global demands for innovations in green technologies, advances in energy efficiency, product and materials designed for circularity (meaning they can be reused or recycled), and improvements in sustainable manufacturing.

“Far more than a mere cosmetic change, the new name reflects the professional activities of our alumni, our coursework, undergraduate research scholarships, and academic offerings, and—critically—the research portfolios of our faculty,” Lipomi says. “This change represents a rebirth of one of America’s first chemical engineering departments at a time when half of our 12 tenure-track faculty are new in the last 2.5 years.”

Faculty leadership and expertise in sustainability

Lipomi says the faculty’s research and teaching interests are already rooted in catalysis, sustainable fuels, environmental remediation, energy storage, biochemical engineering, life‑cycle analysis, and related areas. The department’s research portfolio and recent federal funding awards demonstrate that expertise.

One of the latest examples is research conducted by Associate Professor Marc Porosoff, who is leading a new project funded with more than $550,000 from the Department of Energy to help understand catalytic processes using abundant materials that are designed to leverage intermittent energy sources like wind and solar. His team will collaborate with scientists at Brookhaven National Labs to develop new methods for measuring catalyst structures under dynamic conditions.

“This project is important because it will help meet US energy independence goals,” says Porosoff. “We are also leveraging AI and large language models to represent the catalysts that are integrated into the system, which is a cutting-edge technique and aligned with the push by funding agencies to promote US leadership in AI.”

Earlier this year, Assistant Professor Allison Lopatkin ’13 received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Her project aims to create a practical approach for controlling microbial communities that could be used to aid for bioproduction, environmental cleanup, and human health.

The department’s faculty are leading additional projects in energy-efficient manufacturing, recyclable product design, AI systems with reduced energy consumption, and sustainable practices in healthcare.

Sustainability-focused curriculum

Lipomi says a sustainability focus opens new career opportunities for students because all industries have environmental footprints and chemical engineers help to reduce these footprints through better processes, products, and systems. Traditional sectors—oil and gas, commodity chemicals, cement, steel—also need chemical engineers to drive efficiency and circularity, alongside growth in batteries, clean fuels, and sustainable manufacturing.

While the undergraduate degree title will remain chemical engineering to provide flexibility for traditional chemical engineering students, sustainability is already well integrated into the department’s undergraduate and graduate curriculum offerings.

The department offers a master of science degree track in sustainability and the environment, co-administers a minor in environmental engineering at the bachelor’s degree level with the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, provides several electives in sustainability engineering, and chemical engineering students take a hands-on course called Introduction to Sustainable Energy in their first semester.

“Students today are interested in solving global environmental challenges,” says Lipomi. “Our curriculum prepares them for mission‑oriented work in areas like electrification, remediation, and materials designed for reuse.”

The department has also opened new pathways for undergraduate students to get involved in sustainability research. Earlier this year, a gift from Rochester trustee Barbara J. Burger ’83 helped to establish the Barbara J. Burger Chemical Sustainability Scholars program to provide undergraduate chemistry and chemical engineering students crucial paid research experience at the forefront of sustainability under the guidance of Rochester faculty. The program has inspired additional alumni to similarly support chemical engineering students through paid research opportunities in sustainability.