Georges Belfort, Russell Sage Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the Howard P. Isermann Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering,is the recipient of the "E. V. Murphree Award in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry" sponsored by ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Co.

This award, which is sponsored by Pfizer, Inc., recognizes many of Professor Dordick’s achievements leading to functional bioengineered materials, enzyme-based nanocomposites, and bioactive agents that impact human health and bioprocesses.

A 1991 article authored by Chemical and Biological Engineering Professor B. Wayne Bequette has been ranked by the American Chemical Society as number 23 of the 100 most-cited articles published in the series of Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research journals since 1975. The article is titled “Nonlinear control of chemical processes: a review.”

When it comes to identifying, planning for, and achieving career goals, undergraduate students are getting a head start from the Career Development Center at Rensselaer.

The new supercomputer at Rensselaer has been ranked seventh in the world, and it is the most powerful of any system based at a university, according to the 29th edition of the closely watched Top500 list.

Rensselaer’s Lally School is one of nine new schools to be named to BusinessWeek magazine’s list of top 50 undergraduate business programs.

A delegation from Rensselaer will travel to Europe March 15-22 to meet with leading representatives from government, industry, science, and higher education.

Rensselaer’s Lally School and Albany Law School today announced plans to offer two innovative master’s degree programs in the fields of technology transfer and commercialization.

In a lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, President Shirley Ann Jackson called for a renewed focus on science in key public policy deliberations.

Rensselaer’s annual series of welcoming events called Navigating Rensselaer and Beyond has been awarded the 2006 NASPA Excellence Gold Award.

Brian Schulkin, winner of the first-ever $30,000 Lemelson-Rensselaer Student Prize, has invented an ultralight, handheld terahertz spectrometer.

Four entries were recognized today as the winning ideas of Rensselaer’s “Change the World Challenge” competition.

On Sept. 8, Rensselaer announced an in-kind contribution commercially valued at almost $514 million from the Partners for the Advancement of Collaborative Engineering Education (PACE). PACE is a joint philanthropic initiative of General Motors, EDS, Sun Microsystems, and UGS Corp. to support key academic institutions worldwide with computer-based design tools to prepare students to compete in the future.

In a new approach to treating anthrax exposure, a team of scientists has created an inhibitor designed to tackle the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant strains. Rather than targeting the anthrax bacterium or toxin — the approach taken by the majority of current therapies — the new inhibitor blocks the receptors where anthrax toxin attaches in the body.

Researchers have created organic gel nanomaterials that could be used to encapsulate pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetic products and to build 3-D biological scaffolds for tissue engineering. Using olive oil and six other liquid solvents, the scientists added a simple enzyme to chemically activate a sugar that changed the liquids to organic gels.

Changing a surface from sticky to slippery could now be as easy as flipping a molecular light switch. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created an “optically switchable” material that alters its surface characteristics when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. The new material, which is described in the June 19 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, could have a wide variety of applications, from a protein filter for biological mixtures to a tiny valve on a “lab-on-a-chip.”

More than 100 engineering students from across the Northeast came to Rensselaer March 31-April 1 for the 2006 Northeast Regional Student Conference of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).

From attaching DNA enzymes to nanotubes to simulating proteins under pressure, the work of 33 Rensselaer researchers was presented at the 231st American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting March 26-30 in Atlanta.

Recalls of popular prescription drugs are raising public concern about the general safety of new pharmaceuticals. A collaborative group of Rensselaer and other researchers says that identifying which drug candidates are toxic early in the discovery process can help prevent harmful pharmaceuticals from being placed on the market in the first place, and they have developed a tool to do it.

Five Rensselaer chemical and biological Engineering undergraduates traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, to compete in the International Chem-E-Car Challenge on July 10. The Rensselaer team was one of three U.S. teams in the competition, which included a dozen teams from universities around the world.

One of the first things we learn in chemistry class is that solids conduct heat better than liquids. But a new study suggests that in nanoscale materials, this is not necessarily the case. Using computer simulations, researchers at Rensselaer have found that heat may actually move better across interfaces between liquids than it does between solids.

Applying math and computers to the drug discovery process, researchers at Rensselaer have developed a method to predict protein separation behavior directly from protein structure. This new multi-scale protein modeling approach may reduce the time it takes to bring pharmaceuticals to market and may have significant implications for an array of biotechnology applications, including bioprocessing, drug discovery, and proteomics, the study of protein structure and function.

Five Rensselaer chemical and biological engineering undergraduates traveled to Glasgow, Scotland, to compete in the International Chem-E-Car Challenge on July 10. The Rensselaer team was one of three U.S. teams in the competition, which included a total of 12 teams from universities around the world.

Traditionally, promising pharmaceuticals have been discovered by trial and error — or even by accident. They would then be tested for potency and side effects before, as often as not, being abandoned.

In recent advances, large numbers of promising compounds for potential new drugs have been identified. Yet, the biggest obstacle that remains in drug discovery is the lack of a reliable way to screen these drug candidates to determine toxicity levels early enough in the process.

Seeking to improve and accelerate drug discovery, researchers at Rensselaer and University of California at Berkeley have developed a new technique to rapidly analyze the toxicity of compounds at early stages in the drug discovery process. The technique uses a human enzyme chip called the MetaChip, or metabolizing enzyme toxicology assay chip.

Ravi Kane, the Merck Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has been selected as one of the top 100 young innovators in technology from around the world by Technology Review, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's magazine of innovation.

Drug discovery can frustrate the most patient of researchers, let alone the people who need better treatments for diseases like cancer, heart disease, and AIDS. Researchers at Rensselaer are trying to accelerate the process — and a major grant should help them do just that.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded a Rensselaer research team a $2.7 million, four-year grant to develop new tools for drug discovery.

If plastics lived and breathed, what would they do? They might detect biological weapons. Keep medical implants free of germs. Extend the life of a ship. Two Rensselaer professors have had such advances squarely in their sights. Now their use of simulations is propelling these advances to the next level.

Ravi Kane, assistant professor of chemical engineering, is designing new molecules that may one day fend off an HIV infection. Bolstering the body's molecular defenses is a novel method that may lead to highly effective treatments for HIV, the virus that can lead to AIDS.

Lakshmi Santhanam is searching for molecules with properties that may someday be used as medicines able to pre-empt the damaging inflammatory response involved in atherosclerosis.

Susan Sharfstein is studying how osmotic stress - or adding salt to a cell - affects a cell's protein reproduction. The challenge is to control stress levels. As in humans, too much can be detrimental and may kill the cell or decrease protein reproduction. Finding the proper balance will provide the pharmaceutical industry with a new source of antibodies for the treatment of disease.

Fundamental research conducted at Rensselaer on how proteins behave under high pressure is providing insights that could lead to novel engineering and biotechnology applications.

Researchers at Rensselaer have found a link between the protein that acts as glue in mussels' feet and the molecular makeup of the surface to which they adhere. Understanding this relationship has applications for the development of non-stick surfaces for marine environments, as well as for biomedical procedures and drug development.