Messenger - Vol. 1, No. 1, Page 12 Fall 1991 Chemical engineers amass awards The recent addition of an eighth Presidential Young Investigator and two other prestigious faculty awards have affirmed the position of the Department of Chemical Engineering as one of the nation's elite. In June, Norman J. Wagner, assistant professor, became the eighth member of the chemical engineering faculty to receive the prestigious National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator award. No other chemical engineering department in the country has had more winners of the five-year award. Designed to help universities attract and retain outstanding young researchers, the NSF award carries an annual base grant of $25,000. In addition, up to $37,500 is available to match contributions from industrial sources, bringing the possible total to $1 million per year. Wagner, who joined the University faculty in January, holds a doctorate from Princeton University. His research interests focus on the flow and structure of multi-phase materials, such as liquid crystal polymers and colloidal fluids. His goal is to understand the microscopic behavior of these complex fluids so that engineers may ultimately control their larger structure to produce new and interesting materials. Two other chemical engineering faculty members received national recognition this year. Mark A. Barteau, professor of chemical engineering and chemistry, will receive the Allan P. Colburn Award for excellence in publications in November from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. And Anthony Beris, associate professor of chemical engineering, received a Dow Outstanding Young Faculty Award for initiating new courses in computer engineering at both the graduate and advanced undergraduate level. Barteau's pioneering work on the surface reactivity of metal oxides was cited in his nomination for the Colburn award. He has published more than 65 publications, the first half of which have generated more than 1,000 citations in books and journals. Established in 1945 and named for the central figure largely responsible for the rapid development of chemical engineering at the University, the Colburn award was presented to Arthur Metzner, H. Fletcher Brown Professor of Chemical Engineering, in 1958. Beris was presented his award in June by the Middle Atlantic Section of the American Society for Engineering Education for his contributions to teaching and research in the areas of applied mathematics, modeling, numerical methods and parallel computing.