Brown Engineers Win Four Awards at AIChE National Poster Competition

Several Brown University engineering students attended the 2013 AIChE Annual Student Conference in early November in San Francisco. Four chemical engineering students returned to Providence with awards from the national poster competition. This year's Brown AIChE team that attended the national meeting included: Helen Bergstrom '15, Christy Chao '14, Christopher Culin '14, Cory Hargus '14, and Tegan Tingley '15.

"It was another successful year from our local chapter students in AIChE national competition," said faculty advisor Indrek Kulaots. "The students represented Brown well, and deserved to be congratulated on another great showing."

Nearly 300 posters were presented, and the competition was divided into ten topic areas, and the topic areas were broken down further into subgroups.

Bergstrom and Tingley both presented in the environmental science and engineering category, which was divided into two subgroups, environmental remediation and environmental modeling. Bergstrom and Tingley each won first prize in their subgroup. Tingley presented a poster titled, "Heavy metal removal with iron-containing materials," and won the environmental remediation subgroup. Her supervisors were postdoctoral research associate Liang Guo and Professor Joseph Calo. Bergstrom presented a poster titled, "Evaluation of watershed models for simulation of salt mass balance in seasonally managed wetlands," and won the environmental modeling subgroup. Her work was a collaboration between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Brown University, and she worked with faculty advisor Indrek Kulaots.

Chao presented her poster titled, "Improving nanoparticle biocompatibility through graphene encapsulation," and won second place in her subgroup in the materials engineering and sciences group. She worked with Professor Robert Hurt.

Hargus presented his poster titled, "Looped oxide catalysis: the prospect of bio-oil deoxygenation over reduced metal oxides," and won third place in his subgroup in the catalysis and reaction engineering category. Assistant Professor Andrew Peterson was his faculty supervisor.