Home > Academics > Chemical > Welcome 

Welcome!


TJ Mountziaris,
Department Head

On these Web pages, you'll find some of the most exciting activities in this vital field. Ultimately, everything in chemical engineering revolves around applied chemistry. Biology in the last 15 years has come to be recognized as being systems behavior with chemical underpinnings, so chemical engineering has become a hotbed of "bioengineering" and "biomolecular engineering." Similarly, ChE has a natural and leading role in the chemistry and physics of materials science and engineering, from carefully structured microelectronics and colloids to nanostructured block copolymers and biomaterials. Mastering systems behavior is a key to success, and we have helped set the standards for designing processes from product needs.

 

At UMass Amherst, you'll find all this and more:

  • Undergraduates can study with leaders of the profession; use widely adopted, UMass-authored texts; explore research in the department and co-op jobs in industry; and get ready for entry-level positions in a diverse range of industries.

  • Graduate students have great resources of faculty, top-notch fellow students, and a beautiful new experimental lab building, opening in March 2004, that we'll share with Civil and Environmental Engineering. We are internationally regarded for our leadership in process design and control, polymer and other materials science and engineering, applied molecular and materials modeling, catalytic and noncatalytic kinetics, and biosystems analysis and control.

  • Companies and policy-makers can locate expertise in applied molecular modeling, computational materials science, engineering-based cancer therapies, production of drugs from plant cell cultures, microelectronics processes, polymer science and engineering, colloidal materials, process design and control, combustion pollutant control, rheology, microfluidics, and many more areas.

  • Alumni can find an ever-evolving and vigorous faculty and staff with a passionate commitment to work in the forefront of the profession and to bring it to today's best and brightest students. From our beginnings in the 1950's, we've produced distinguished faculty like Matt Tirrell (Dean of Engineering at UC-Santa Barbara), Mike Malone (Isenberg Distinguished Professor and Dean of Engineering at UMass), and Rich Calabrese (Maryland); leaders of industry like Marv Schlanger (chair and CEO of Resolution Performance Products, formerly President and CEO of ARCO Chemical), Jack Welch (former CEO of General Electric), Jack Drosdick (Chairman, CEO, and President of Sunoco Inc.), Robert Querido (former president of Phibro Animal Health); and business and technical leaders throughout the world.

Come see us, and come join us. We're having fun, working hard, and finding amazing things in the Department of Chemical Engineering at UMass Amherst!