Brown Engineering senior Joseph DePinho took first place, while senior Tej Maheshwari took second place in the 2025 American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) annual undergraduate student poster competition in Boston.
An engineering physics concentrator, DePinho’s poster was titled, “Thermal Modeling of Si3N4 Photonic Integrated Circuits for Low-Power Data Interconnects,” and took top honors in the Computing and Process Control category. He completed his research at the University of Michigan under the supervision of Dr. Zheshen Zhang through the Semiconductor Research Corporation Research Scholars program.
Chemical engineering’s Tej Maheshwari placed second in the Catalysis and Reactor Engineering division for his research project titled, “Electrifying Fertilizer: Density Functional Theory Analysis of a CuAg Catalyst for Increasing Selectivity of Electrocatalytic Urea Synthesis.” Maheshwari is supervised by Professor Andrew Peterson.
Chemical engineer Jimmy Lee ’27 also represented Brown at the conference. His poster titled, “A Quantitative Optimization of Site-Biased Benchtop Protein Labelling” was advised by Assistant Professor Theresa Raimondo.
Over 300 AIChE undergraduate student members presented their research in sustainability, catalysis and reaction engineering, computing and process control, environmental aspects of chemical engineering, as well as food, pharmaceutical, bioengineering, fuels, petrochemicals, energy, materials, separations, and other topics at the annual conference.