Congratulations to this year's chemical engineering undergraduate award winners.The following undergraduate awards were presented at the end of the 2019-2020 academic year to deserving chemical engineering students.
FOURTH-YEAR AWARDS
American Institute of Chemists Award
Sponsored by the American Institute of Chemists Foundation, given to the student with the highest GPA in a chemistry-related discipline, including chemical engineering, chemistry and biochemistry.
Michael Schapowal
David Lee Preddy Award

Mara K. Kuenen, a Ph.D. student in assistant professor Rachel Letteri's research group, has won the 2020 Chemical Engineering DuPont Student Safety Award.
DuPont provided a gift to fund the annual award to promote safety in research labs. Students can submit a proposal for improving safety or apply for the award based on ideas that have been implemented.

Professor and chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Virginia Bill Epling was the invited speaker at the Thomas E. Hutchinson Award Dinner on Jan. 25, presented by the Trigon Engineering Society. In his remarks, Epling highlighted the uniqueness of the UVA School of Engineering, the importance of teaching and leadership, and the challenges today's students will face as engineers of the future.

Alan Hunter, a 2002 chemical engineering Ph.D. graduate who studied with Lawrence R. Quarles Professor Giorgio Carta at the University of Virginia, will represent AstraZeneca as the recipient of the 2020 Division of Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society (known as ACS BIOT) Industrial Biotechnology Award at the division's 2020 meeting in Philadelphia.

Chemical engineering Ph.D. student Hongxi Luo was selected to receive the NAMS Student Fellowship Award.
The award is given each year by the North American Membrane Society (NAMS) to “outstanding graduate students in the membrane science and technology area.” The award will support Luo's participation in the society's 2020 meeting in May in Tempe, Ariz.
Luo is a member of the polymer member research group led by assistant professor Geoffrey Geise.

University of Virginia Chemical Engineering Professor of Practice Michael L. King was honored to be invited to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers' “Doing a World of Good” gala in New York City in December. At the gala, the institute recognized Merck & Co. and the company's chief executive officer, Ken Frazier, with a Doing a World of Good award. King worked at Merck for 32 years, retiring as senior vice president science and technology, before joining UVA's chemical engineering faculty.

Evan Day, a student in Associate Professor Matt Lazzara's lab, is the 2019 winner of the W.H. Peterson Oral Presentation Award given by the Division of Biochemical Technology of the American Chemical Society. The award is for his presentation on work that led to the creation of a new tool to evaluate the in vivo (taking place in a living organism) efficacy of targeted inhibitors for cancer.

Rising third-year chemical engineering majors David Lee of Yorktown, Va., and Geoffrey Burns of Concord, Mass., spent the summer at UVA Engineering in the lab with Associate Professor Bryan Berger working on finding a more effective and environmentally friendly way to treat harmful algal blooms.

Rising fourth-year chemical engineering Ph.D. student Hongxi Luo and his advisor, Assistant Professor Geoffrey Geise, co-authored a study, “Assembling a natural small molecule into a supramolecular network with high structural order and dynamic functions,” that recently was accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Luo and Geise collaborated on the research with 2016 Nobel laureate in chemistry Ben Feringa of the University of Groningen and Da-Hui Qu of East China University of Science and Technology.

Fourth-year ChE graduate student Lucas Kimerer received a Best Poster Award at the 48th International Symposium on High-Performance Liquid Phase Separations and Related Techniques (known as HPLC 2019) held in Milan, Italy, in June. Lucas' poster was selected out of 508 poster presentations at the event. He received a certificate and a cash award.