Davidson School of Chemical Engineering is pleased to welcome new faculty member Dr. Cornelius Masuku as Associate Professor of Engineering Practice. Dr. Masuku will begin his new role on August 17, 2020. Dr. Masuku is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Lorenz T. Biegler's Group at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds undergraduate degrees in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science and a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa.

Purdue Chemical Engineering graduate students Pushkar Ghanekar and Nicole Libretto were selected to receive two CISTAR Fellowships. Ghanekar was named recipient of the Bill Murray CISTAR Fellowship. Libretto is recipient of the Dick Reitz CISTAR Fellowship. The Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR) is an NSF-funded Center at Purdue University, performing research to create a transformative engineered system to convert light hydrocarbons from shale resources to chemicals and transportation fuels in smaller, modular, local, and highly networked processing plants.

Dr. Vilas Pol, Professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, has been elected as Chair of the Sustainability Committee, one of the six Purdue University Resources Policy Committees that guide the optimal planning and use of the physical resources of the University.

Dr. Brett Savoie, Assistant Professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, is one of only eight recipients of the inaugural Dreyfus Program for Machine Learning in the Chemical Sciences & Engineering Award. Dr. Savoie was selected to receive support for his proposal, Transfer Learning for Deep Generative Chemical Models.

LyoHUB, a university-industry center that is part of the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, is offering a new online course and other resources created to help researchers who would benefit from LyoHUB's facilities and knowledge, including research efforts related to COVID-19. The free course supports the goal of LyoHUB to improve the efficiency, science, and technology of freeze-drying in pharmaceuticals and other areas.