COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Nov. 6, 2009 – Mahmoud El-Halwagi, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been named recipient of the 2009 Research Excellence in Sustainable Engineering Award.

The prestigious award is presented by the Sustainable Engineering Forum (SEF) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and recognizes basic or applied research results relative to the sustainability of products, processes or the environment. It is annually bestowed upon a researcher who has made significant technical contributions to the advancement of sustainable engineering in research, teaching and development activities.

Holder of the McFerrin Professorship, El-Halwagi is internationally known for his pioneering contributions in the fields of sustainable design and process integration, and he has written two widely used texts on the subject. At Texas A&M, he teaches senior-level undergraduate and graduate classes, covering the areas of sustainability, process design, simulation, economics, integration and optimization.

The SEF seeks collaborative work in programming and education objectives with other professional societies, both national and foreign. Specific focus areas of the forum include using appropriate metrics for sustainability; developing approaches for designing products and processes that can be optimized to desired metrics criteria and that incorporate environmental and societal benefit factors; and assessing impacts of resource use on environmental and social benefits of products, processes and services.

Other focus areas include designing new processes or products that are comparatively benign; responding to socioeconomic measures such as emission trading; and developing educational materials related to the field.

El-Halwagi will receive the award at an awards ceremony taking place during the 2009 AIChE Annual Meeting in Nashville.

The system is detailed this month in “Lab on a Chip,” a scientific journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry – the largest organization in Europe for advancing the chemical sciences.

It represents a significant step in understanding bacterial interactions in the GI tract because it accurately simulates conditions within that area by enabling human epithelial cells to grow in balance with the naturally occurring bacteria (termed “commensal”) that reside in the GI tract.

Traditionally, growing both types of these cells simultaneously in a laboratory environment has been difficult because bacteria reproduce at a much faster rate than epithelial cells and tend to monopolize the nutrients needed by the epithelial cells, says Jayaraman, assistant professor in Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering.

“If you try to achieve this in a cell-culture dish what happens is that you have a very nutrient-rich environment that bacteria basically thrive in, dividing rapidly,” Jayaraman says. “You can start with the same number of cells, relatively in proportion, but the bacteria will keep dividing, taking up all of the nutrients. Epithelial cells then do not get what they need. They are typically more finicky than bacterial cells. The numbers then kick in, and it is an exponential process where you will soon have millions of bacteria outnumbering epithelial cells, which will soon die.”

That doesn’t happen in Jayaraman’s model, which grows the epithelial and commensal cell colonies separately before allowing them to interact as they would in the gut. Once the two types of cells are interacting in the right balance, Jayaraman can recreate the sequence of events in a GI tract infection by introducing a foreign pathogen – in this case, Enterohemorrhagic E. coli – to the cells within his model.

Previous studies have just added pathogenic bacteria into colonies of endothelial cells, but this approach does not replicate the cellular interactions and chemical signals present in the human GI tract, Jayaraman notes.

“If you really want to understand how the commensal bacteria that are in the GI tract either prevent or enhance infection, you need to have a way in which you can actually recreate the system with both components present – the commensal cells and the epithelial cells,” Jayaraman says. “To our knowledge, this is the first report describing co-culture of bacteria and epithelial cells and its application to investigate pathogen colonization and infection.”

Commensal bacteria, he explains, produce a wide range of bacterial signals, and the concentration of these signals in the GI tract is extremely high.

These signals, he adds, are given off during normal metabolic processes of the cells. While there is no evidence to suggest that they were created specifically for defensive purposes, some of these signals have evolved to act as a line of defense. Others may actually enhance a pathogen’s infectious potential, he says. For the invading pathogen, it’s a matter of “talking” to the right cells and avoiding the “wrong” ones.

It’s a game of “push and pull” that is further complicated by the fact that the strength of these signal levels varies, Jayaraman says. For example, a person may be under a lot of stress, which can cause stress hormones to be high and might in turn diminish the signals that aid in defense against a pathogen. Other times, a gastric disease might kill some of these cells that are emitting a protective signal, lowering the overall strength of the signal and making a person more susceptible to serious infection, Jayaraman notes.

So far, Jayaraman’s model has yielded some interesting findings, shedding light on the constant array of signals being emitted within the GI tract and their effects on invading pathogens. One of those findings reveals how indole, a chemical produced by commensal cells within the GI tract, acts a signal to foreign pathogens.

“Indole already has been shown as an important signal for communication between bacteria,” Jayaraman says. “We are looking at how pathogens might also be affected by indole, and we are seeing that they are indeed affected.”

Specifically, if a pathogen passes through bacteria that produce indole, the pathogen will become less infectious, Jayaraman explains. Conversely, if it passes through bacteria where there is no indole, the pathogen retains it same degree of virulence.

“In a sense, the pathogen is looking for weak points in a ‘wall’ of defense,” Jayaraman says. “We believe this can be applied to several other signals. There might be signals that increase a pathogen’s infectiousness. Does it choose a location in the wall where it can pass through without decreasing its infectious potential, or does it look for a place where its infectiousness is enhanced?”

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Contact: Arul Jayaraman at (979) 845-3306 or via email at: arulj@tamu.edu or Ryan A. Garcia at (979) 845-9237 or via email at: ryan.garcia99@tamu.edu.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Nov. 2, 2009 – M. Sam Mannan, director of the Texas A&M University System Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center, will deliver a keynote address at the 38th Annual Iowa Governor’s Safety and Health Conference in Cedar Rapids.

Mannan, who also holds the title of regents professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M, is scheduled to present “Making the right Decision: What we Learn From History” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 4 at the Cedar Rapids Marriott Hotel.

This year’s conference theme is “Safety at Risk: Choice and Influence.”

Mannan, a professional engineer and certified safety professional, is an internationally recognized expert on process safety and risk assessment. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and a member of the American Society of Safety Engineers, International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration and National Fire Protection Association. In addition to his many professional honors and achievements, Mannan has served as a consultant to numerous entities in both the academic and private sectors, including the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

In addition to Mannan’s address, the conference also will feature keynote presentations from John S. Bresland, chairman/ chief executive officer of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and John Henshaw, former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

COLLEGE STATION, Nov. 2, 2009 – Mark Deimund, a senior in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been named one of five student recipients of the 2009-2010 Craig C. Brown Outstanding Senior Engineer Award.

The award is considered the most prestigious honor bestowed on a graduating senior in the university’s Dwight Look College of Engineering and is presented to a student who demonstrates scholastic achievement, leadership skills and a strong moral character. Recipients must have a 3.5 minimum overall GPR, participate in numerous university organizations and posses such qualities as loyalty, honor, duty and integrity.

Deimund is a chemical engineering major from Oklahoma City, Okla. Cited by one professor as among his top 10 undergraduates in the last quarter-century, Deimund is a member of four honor societies: Tau Beta Pi, Omega Chi Epsilon, Phi Kappa Phi and Phi Eta Sigma. His current term as president caps three years of leadership roles in the Texas A&M chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers.

He has been a Chem-E Car team leader since 2007, guiding his group to multiple wins at regional and national competitions. He has worked summers for Celanese Chemicals as an R&D intern in Texas and a process engineering intern in Virginia. His volunteer work has included Texas A&M Big Event, Habitat for Humanity and Super Summer Southern Baptist Youth Leadership Camp.

Deimund has assisted with Texas A&M research on a biomass processing technique that is being patented and published. He visited 15 states during travels this past summer while earning his business management certificate for engineers. He is scheduled to graduate in May 2010.

In addition to Deimund, seniors Colin Bailie, Alexandra (Sandra) Iacob, Rachel Oyler and Rodrigo Garza Urquiza received the annual award. Each of the seniors received an engraved medallion and a $5,000 educational grant. Their names appear on a plaque in the Zachry Engineering Center.

Formerly known as the Engineering Faculty Senior Award, the award was renamed in 1996 to honor Craig C. Brown for his vision to expand and enhance the recognition program through a permanent endowment. Brown is a 1975 civil engineering graduate and past recipient of the award. He is currently president, owner and chief operating officer of Bray International Inc. and president and chairman of the board of the Craig C. Brown Foundation.

Carreto-Vazquez, who interned at BASF, was part of a vinsol resin team that assisted seven of the corporation’s facilities in achieving safer operations by identifying flammable dust used at the facilities and helping facilitate transition to a less-flammable variation of the product. Carreto-Vazquez internship was in BASF’s Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering division in Wyandotte, Mich.

The honor, which is bestowed by BASF’s senior vice president of ecology and safety, recognizes employees, leaders and teams who have distinguished themselves through their outstanding work while at BASF.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Oct. 21, 2009 – Authorities on safety from throughout the world will convene in College Station next week as part of a two-day symposium aimed at making the process industry a safer place and sponsored by the Texas A&M University System Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center.

The symposium “Beyond Regulatory Compliance, Making Safety Second Nature” is scheduled for Oct. 27-28 at the Hilton Conference Center and will feature wide variety of safety-related lectures and presentations, including process safety challenges in a hydrogen economy; effective process safety auditing techniques; technical analysis of the Buncefield explosion; and various topics pertaining to liquefied natural gas.

In addition, the symposium will feature exhibits from companies looking to demonstrate products, technology and software related to process safety.

“This symposium serves as the crossroads for process safety where industry, academia, government agencies and other stakeholders come together to discuss critical issues of research in process safety,” said M. Sam Mannan, director of the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center. “I firmly believe that we are making major strides towards our goal of making safety second nature,” added Mannan, who also holds the title of Regents Professor in Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering.

Andrew Hopkins, professor of sociology at the Australian National University, headlines a distinguished list of presenters speaking throughout the two-day span and will deliver the annual Frank P. Lees Memorial Lecture. Hopkins is scheduled to present “Why BP Failed to Learn the Lessons: The Texas City Refinery Explosion” at 8 a.m. Tuesday, Oct. 27.

Hopkins, who served as an expert witness at the Royal Commission, which investigated the causes of the fire at Esso’s gas plant at Longford in Victoria in 1998, has written several books focusing on the organizational and cultural causes of major accidents.

In 2001 he was the expert member of the board of inquiry into the exposure of Air Force maintenance workers to toxic chemicals. He has been involved in various government occupational health and safety reviews and has consulted with major companies in the resources sector.

In addition, Hopkins served as a consultant to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board in its investigation of the Texas City accident and has published a book on that accident, “Failure to Learn: the BP Texas City Refinery Disaster.”

Hopkins has a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Australian National University, a Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut and is a Fellow of the Safety Institute of Australia.

Established in 1995, the Mary Kay O’Connor Process Safety Center is dedicated to enhancing safety in the chemical process industry. The center conducts various educational endeavors aimed at “making safety second nature” to everyone in the industry. In addition, center researchers work to develop safer processes, equipment, procedures and management strategies to minimize losses.

For more information about the symposium, including a full schedule, visit http://psc.tamu.edu/ and click on “2009 Symposium,” or contact Donna Startz at (979) 845-5981 or via email: donnas@tamu.edu.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Oct. 14, 2009 – Abraham Stroock, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Cornell University, will discuss his research Wednesday, Oct. 21, as part of the 2009 J.D. Lindsay Lecture Series at Texas A&M University.

Stroock’s presentation, “Microvascular Structure and Function in vitro,” is scheduled from 3-4 p.m. in Rm. 106 of the Jack E. Brown Building. His presentation is sponsored by Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering.

Vascular structure – a network of convective paths – is a ubiquitous element in multicellular, living systems, Stroock says. The key function of vascular structure in animals and plants is mediation of convective mass transfer over macroscopic distances. This transfer allows an organism to monitor and control the chemical state of its tissues, he explains.

In Stroock’s laboratory, his research group is developing methods to embed and operate microfluidic systems within tissue-like materials in order to capture this function for both biological and non-biological applications. His presentation will detail examples of his efforts, including his experiments with “synthetic trees” in which he has reproduced the main features of transpiration.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in physics at Cornell, Stroock spent two years in France where he worked in the research division of Electricite de France and completed a master’s degree at the University of Paris VI and XI in solid state physics. Upon returning to the United States, he earned his doctoral degree at Harvard University and in 2003 joined Cornell as an assistant professor.

He is the recipient of the Henry and Camille Dreyfus New faculty award, the North American Mixing Forum Start-Up Award, the Office of Naval Research’s Young Investigator award, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award, the NSF CAREER Award, and the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award. In addition, he has been named to MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list of top innovators under 35.

In honor of Professor J.D. Lindsay, Texas A&M’s first chemical engineering department head, the department established the Lindsay Lecture Series to bring speakers to the university. Coming from both industry and academia, the lecturers are recognized for their accomplishments in the practice, teaching and/or research of chemical engineering. The series also allows the lecturers several days for visiting the university and the department and for exchanging ideas on teaching and research objectives and methods.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Oct. 19, 2009 – Costas D. Maranas, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, will discuss his research Wednesday, Oct. 28, as part of the 2009 J.D. Lindsay Lecture Series at Texas A&M University.

Maranas’ presentation, “Using Computations to Reconstruct, Analyze and Redesign Metabolism,” is scheduled from 3-4 p.m. in Rm. 106 of the Jack E. Brown Building. His presentation is sponsored by Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering.

Maranas will discuss speeding up the process of building organism-specific metabolic models by automatically filling in connectivity gaps and restoring consistency with gene essentiality experiments. His presentation will highlight ongoing genome-scale reconstruction efforts in his research group and explore how computations can help elucidate metabolic flows using isotope labeling experiments. The latest optimization based techniques will also be described for strain optimization leading to the microbial overproduction of targeted compounds including chemicals identified as promising biofuels.

The Donald B. Broughton Professor at Penn State, Maranas’ research interests include computational protein design; reconstruction, curation and analysis of metabolic networks; microbial strain optimization; design of biological circuits and synthetic biology; signaling networks and multi-scale modeling in cancer biology, network science, optimization theory and algorithms.

Maranas earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1990 at Aristotle University in Greece. He then received his master’s degree in chemical engineering in 1992 at Princeton University before earning his Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1995 from Princeton.

He is the recipient of the Allan P. Colburn Award for Excellence in Publication and a member of the editorial boards for “Biophysical Journal, Computers & Chemical Engineering” and “Metabolic Engineering.” He also is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering and a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Energy.

In honor of Professor J.D. Lindsay, Texas A&M’s first chemical engineering department head, the department established the Lindsay Lecture Series to bring speakers to the university. Coming from both industry and academia, the lecturers are recognized for their accomplishments in the practice, teaching and/or research of chemical engineering. The series also allows the lecturers several days for visiting the university and the department and for exchanging ideas on teaching and research objectives and methods.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Oct. 8, 2009 – Greg Stephanopoulos, H.D. Dow Professor of Biotechnology and Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will discuss his research Wednesday and Thursday (Oct. 14-15) as the invited speaker for the 2009 McFerrin Lectures at Texas A&M University.

Stephanopoulos is scheduled to present “Biofuels and Metabolic Engineering,” Wednesday at 3 p.m. in Rm. 106 of the Jack E. Brown Building. The following day he will present “Transcriptional, Metabolomic and Flux Data: What Are They Good For?” at 11 a.m. in Rm. 256.

Stephanopoulos is the second visiting lecturer to have the McFerrin title bestowed upon him. His presentations are sponsored by Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering. Last year, Babatunde A. Ogunnaike of the University of Delaware delivered the inaugural lecture.

Stephanopoulos’ research interests span a broad spectrum of biotechnological applications, including the cultivation and physiology of mammalian cells (in particular, investigation of cell death in sustained cell culture, glycosylation and regulated secretion); metabolic engineering and its applications to the production of amino acids and biochemicals; and bioinformatics and functional genomics whereby new genomics-based technologies are applied to the elucidation of cell physiology and metabolic engineering.

His work has appeared in more than 300 publications and resulted in 25 patents. He presently serves on the editorial boards of seven scientific journals and on the advisory boards of five chemical engineering departments. He also is the editor-in-chief of “Metabolic Engineering.”

Dr. Stephanopoulos has been recognized with the Dreyfus Foundation Teacher Scholar Award, the Excellence in Teaching Award and the Technical Achievement Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has been a Presidential Young Investigator and Chairman of the AIChE Food Pharmaceutical & Bioengineering Division.

His numerous honors and distinctions include the FPBE Division Award at AIChE, the Marvin J. Johnson Award of the American Chemical Society, and the AIChE Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering. In 2002 Dr. Stephanopoulos was elected to the AIChE Board of Directors, and in 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Dr. Stephanopoulos also is a recipient of the C. Thom Award from SIM, the AIChE Founders Award, the Amgen Award in Biochemical Engineering and ACS Murphree Award.

Named in honor of Arthur R. “Artie” McFerrin, Jr., a 1965 graduate of Texas A&M and an avid supporter of both the department and university, the McFerrin Lectures were established in 2008 to enable prominent chemical engineering researchers from throughout the world to visit Texas A&M and interact with students and faculty through lectures on their given areas of expertise.

The McFerrin Lectures are made possible by the generosity of McFerrin, who serves as chairman and CEO of KMCO, Inc. and in 2005 committed $10 million to establish an endowed fund in support of chemical engineering at Texas A&M.

McFerrin is an Outstanding Alumnus of the chemical engineering department and a recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award – the highest honor bestowed upon a former student of the institution.

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, Sept. 28, 2009 – Orlin D. Velev, INVISTA professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University, will discuss his research Wednesday, Oct. 7, as part of the 2009 J.D. Lindsay Lecture Series at Texas A&M University.

Velev’s presentation, “On-chip Liquid and Particle Manipulation by AC Electric Fields: Applications in Colloidal Assembly and Microfluidics,” is scheduled from 3-4 p.m. in Rm. 106 of the Jack E. Brown Building. His presentation is sponsored by Texas A&M’s Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering.

Velev will detail how dielectrophoresis, particle interaction with external AC fields, could be used to manipulate and assemble objects on any size scale. The structures that could be assembled on a chip include microwires from metallic nanoparticles, switchable photonic crystals and biocomposite “wires” and membranes. Velev says an additional level of complexity can be engineered to turn various types of miniature semiconductor diode particles into prototypes of self-propelling micromachines and micropumps.

Velev’s research focuses on the area of nanostructures with electrical and photonic functionality, biosensors and microfluidic devices. He was the first to synthesize “inverse opals”, one of the most widely studied types of photonic materials. He also has pioneered principles for microscopic biosensors with direct electrical detection, discovered novel types of self-assembling supraparticles, microwires and designed new microfluidic chips.

Velev received his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria while also spending one year as a researcher in Nagayama Protein Array Project in Japan. After graduating in 1996, Velev accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Delaware. In 2001 he formed his new research group in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University and was promoted to full professor in 2008.

In honor of Professor J.D. Lindsay, Texas A&M’s first chemical engineering department head, the department established the Lindsay Lecture Series to bring speakers to the university. Coming from both industry and academia, the lecturers are recognized for their accomplishments in the practice, teaching and/or research of chemical engineering. The series also allows the lecturers several days for visiting the university and the department and for exchanging ideas on teaching and research objectives and methods.