William G. Lowrie Dept. Of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Alumnus Michael Tomechko, a first-year PhD student at the University of California Berkeley, won a 2026-27 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship!

Working with Neil Razdan's Catalysis and Carbon Circularity research group, Tomechko's research focus is electrochemical alkene epoxidation.

Read more: https://bit.ly/MT_GRFP

Wonderful news from the laboratory of Professor Blaise Kimmel! Two first-year students, Soren Spina and Aleah Treiterer, have won National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships.

Spina and Treiterer are working to develop "smart" immunotherapies and innovative methods of immunotherapy cancer treatment.

Within the College of Engineering, Spina and Treiterer are two out of only three graduate students to win the award this year. There were a total of five graduate students winning at The Ohio State University at large.

We look forward to hearing more about their exciting research!

https://bit.ly/OSU_NSF_GRFPs

The extraordinary efforts of the Ohio State Chapter of AIChE - American Institute of Chemical Engineers were recognized by the College of Engineering with the 2026 Overall Outstanding Student Organization Award!

Shown below are advisor Professor David Tomasko (right) with AIChE members Nitya Nekkanti, Bella Porter, Rushana Vafakulova and AIChE President Korey Cantrell.

Thank you for all you do! You all do an amazing job with an impressive array of activities and events which make life better for both students and community members. We appreciate you. Thank you!!

Read more: https://bit.ly/BestOrg

We have many reasons to be proud of rising star Katelyn Swindle-Reilly! Not only was she elected to the highly prestigious American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering's College of Fellows, which represents the top 2% of the nation's engineers in these fields -- she won the Society For Biomaterials' 2026 Mid-Career Award!

Swindle-Reilly, who has joint appointments in Biomedical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences, examines the design of polymeric biomaterials for soft tissue repair and drug delivery with focused applications in ophthalmology and wound healing.

Learn more: https://bit.ly/K_S-W

More success!
https://cbe.osu.edu/news/2026/02/saeed-derakhshesh-jungwon-yun-win-travel-awards

Thank you for stepping up!

Congrats!

Congratulations to Priya Jana (Nicholas Brunelli lab) and Anant Sohale (Umit Ozkan lab). Jana and Sohale both placed second in their AIChE Catalysis & Reaction Engineering Divisions' poster competitions. The CRE Division is the largest division within AIChE, with hundreds of participants.

The title of Jana's presentation was "Scalable Manufacturing of inorganic nanomaterials using jet mixing reactors."

Sohale's was "Going Beyond Oxygen Reduction Reaction: Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Nanostructures (CNx) As Catalysts for Electrocatalytic Hydrogenation of p-Nitrophenol in Acidic Medium."

Read more: https://bit.ly/CRE-CBE25

A central challenge in sustainable catalysis is converting carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas, into useful chemicals using less energy. However, postdoctoral scholar S.M. Gulam Rabbani and his mentor, Rachel Getman, have developed a rational design framework that addresses that challenge and supports the development of sustainable, closed-loop carbon systems. Their system operates efficiently at 180 °C, maintains stable activity and high methanol selectivity for over 3,600 hours, and achieves per-pass yields exceeding those of state-of-the-art catalysts under comparable conditions. The research will be published in Nature Chemistry.

Next-gen catalyst design enables energy-efficient carbon dioxide conversion S.M. Gulam Rabbani's work addressing a central challenge in sustainable catalysis to be published in Nature Chemistry

Ioana Cosmin, who is co-advised by Jessica Winter and Davita L. Watkins, Ph.D., will make a presentation titled “Evaluating Hydrophobic Chain Length and Branching Under High Voltage Liquid-in-Liquid Electrospray (LIL-E)” at the Atlanta ACS meeting on Wednesday, March 25, 2026! Congratulations.
Read: https://bit.ly/IoanaCosmin

Congrats to Fatemeh Azadi from the Lauren Taylor research group for placing third in the College of Engineering Three-Minute Thesis competition!

Fatemeh Azadi places in Three-Minute Thesis Competition An 80,000-word thesis or dissertation would take nine hours to read aloud. The time limit for this competition is three minutes.