Good reasons to study with us

The Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UB is known nationally and internationally for academic excellence in both teaching and research.

We rank high

• The periodical Chemical Engineering Education computed the NRC rankings on a per-faculty-member rather than per-department basis—we are not one of the larger departments—and ranked the department 13th in the US.
• Studies conducted by the University of Pittsburgh, ranked the department among the top 10 in the world based research publications per faculty and their impact on the field as manifested by the quality of the scientific journals in which the papers were published and the number of citations each paper received.
• National Research Council consistently ranks the department among the top 30 of the 161 departments of chemical engineering in the United States.

What you can do here

You can work in the forefront of the discipline. The stimulating atmosphere in our department encourages and supports exciting research in:

• core chemical engineering disciplines: molecular transformations, multiscale processes, and chemical systems engineering
• emerging areas: biochemical, biomedical, and metabolic engineering; nanotechnology; and advanced polymeric, electronic, and optical materials

For detailed descriptions of department research, see research areas.

Research projects are generously supported by federal and state funding agencies and by industry.

Where you can go from here

The following is a list of what our past four years (2001-04) of PhD graduates went on to do when they were finished here.

• Post Doc: California Institute of Technology
• Professor: Feng-Chia University, Taiwan
• CVD Engineer: GE Advanced Materials
• Senior Engineer: Westinghouse Savannah River Co.
• Project Manager: Nobel Limited
• Post Doc: University at Buffalo
• Research Scientist: Pressure Products
• Post Doc: Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Post Doc: Johns Hopkins University
• [unknown]: Exxon/Mobil
• Post-doctoral fellow: UC Davis
• [unknown]: Tyco Healthcare
• Post Doc: University of Massachusetts
• Assistant Professor: IIT, Bombay, India
• Research Scientist: Innovalight, Inc. [Innovalight is a venture-capital funded startup company that, in part, is attempting to commercialize a process developed by Xuegeng during his Ph.D.]
• Post Doc: Pacific Northwest National Labs
• Senior CAD Engineer: Intel [His starting salary was $11K higher than his Ph.D. advisor's 9-month salary at the time, and he gets stock options]
• Post Doc: Johns Hopkins
• Post Doc: University at Buffalo
• Post Doc: MIT

Buffalo—our community

The Buffalo area is an excellent place for graduate students to live and study. Buffalo has fine summers, snowy winters, good housing, and plenty for a grad student to do.

Congeniality and collaboration

You will benefit from our wider research community. Interactions with researchers are encouraged by the department and are welcomed by our colleagues in other departments. These interactions can be an important component of the preparation for your research career. You can learn how advances in your research work drive and are driven by interactions among researchers with diverse backgrounds. Such collaborations offer unique opportunities for graduate students to engage in interdisciplinary research, and are engaged with a solid spirit of congeniality and cooperation.

Faculty scholarship

You can study with the best. Our faculty has a distinguished and extensive publication record.

Flexible programming

Our graduate academic programs can be tailored to meet your needs. They are designed to provide flexibility that allows you to develop special technical interests and to acquire new skills. In collaboration with organized research centers, multidisciplinary studies are available in the fields of advanced materials and bioengineering.

Interdisciplinary opportunities

We enjoy strong and fruitful collaborations in bio-related areas with several departments and centers at UB, including bioinformatics and drug design and discovery.

We also have strong research affiliations with departments in the natural sciences and with UB research centers and institutes such as the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics and the Center for Advanced Photonic and Electronic Materials.

Biophotonics fellowships

If you have an interested biological applications of photonics, you can compete for one of UB's NSF-sponsored Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) fellowships, carrying a $30,000 annual stipend for study in the area of biophotinics materials and applications. Our graduate students currently hold three of these fellowships. See biophotonics IGERT information.

Award-winning faculty

• Eli Ruckenstein, already much honored, was awarded the National Medal of Science at the White House in 1998, and received the Founder's Award from the National Academy of Engineering in 2004.
• Paschalis Alexandridis was awarded the Sigma Xi Young Investigator Award in 2002 and received an NSF CAREER award in 1999.
• Jeffrey R. Errington received an NSF CAREER Award in 2003.
• David Kofke received the John M. Prausnitz Award in Applied Chemical Thermodynamics in 2004.
• Carl Lund received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator award in 1988, and was named SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in 2007.
• Johannes M. Nitsche received an NSF Presidential Young Investogator Award in 1994.
• Mark Swihart received J.B. Wagner Young Investigator award of the High Temperature Materials Division of the Electrochemical Society in 2003.
• Esther Takeuchi was named Greatbatch Professor of Advanced Power Sources in 2007.

Supercomputing support

UB's Center for Computational Research, a leading academic supercomputing facility, supports multidisciplinary opportunities in computational research. Learn more about CCR.

Learn more about chemical and biological engineering research using CCR facilities.

School and university

UB's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences offers graduate degrees in civil, structural and environmental engineering; computer science and engineering; electrical engineering; industrial engineering; and mechanical and aerospace engineering in addition to chemical and biological engineering.

The school either houses or has strong research affiliations with such nationally known UB research centers as the Center for Advanced Photonics and Electronic Materials;Center for Computational Research (currently one of the world's faster supercomputing clusters); Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics; National Center for Geographic Information Analysis; Center for Multisource Information Infusion; Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research; and a great many others.

As a research-intensive university, the University at Buffalo supports and houses a wide array of research institutes, centers, and laboratories. These organized units, and the research projects of individual faculty members, accounted for more than $300 million in grants from federal and state agencies, foundations, and industrial research partners in 2004.