Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Research hubs that leverage CBE’s historical strengths in biomolecular science & design, molecular simulations and modeling, soft materials, and sustainable energy systems provide an integrated framework for advancing CBE’s strategic goals across all dimensions of the school’s mission. Our strategic plan calls for development of hubs in four areas:

• Hub 1: Biomolecular foundry (CBE, MAE, BME, BEE, Cornell Institute of Biotechnology, Immuno engineering program, VCM, Weill)
• Hub 2: Functional soft materials hub (CBE, MSE, MAE, CEE, CCMR, CNF)
• Hub 3: Computational process and product design (CBE, ORIE, MAE, Tech)
• Hub 4: Scalable sustainable technology (CESI, Atkinson, CALS, Tech, CoE partners)

These hubs will serve first as centers of excellence for impactful, multidisciplinary research; potential partners in these efforts are listed in the parentheses. They will also be designed to: (i) promote innovations in experiential learning; (ii) develop community and synergy across the schools BS, MS and PhD programs; (iii) promote convergence of research towards translation to products, industry engagement; and (iv) increase national visibility in key areas relevant for solving society’s grandest challenges. Additionally, the hubs will be designed to support College-wide initiatives (e.g., in product design for manufacturing) and to nucleate multi-investigator Center programs that benefit the broader Cornell community.

This initiative focuses on a human capital investment around an MS “on ramp” program will set up students for successful PhDs and feed into all our other mission efforts. This flagship initiative has the potential to broadly advance our mission by increasing student quality throughout our programs, yielding 8 better research productivity, supplying human capital for experiential learning hubs & pedagogical studies, increasing URM/female PhD, PD, and faculty, promoting best practices in faculty research mentoring, teaching, leadership, D&I. Overall, it will lead to a more integrated, connected community. In collaboration with MSE, CBE has developed an initial version of this idea in a proposal to the American Chemical Society (ACS) for fellowship support for a transitional MS program.

This flagship program aims to provide continuous professional development and leadership training for our faculty that will lead to improved success in mentoring, teaching, and research outcomes and efficiencies in administration. It is organized in 3 levels: Level 1: Invest in faculty development; Level 2: Develop faculty shared governance & CBE visibility campus-wide; and Level 3: Promote formal faculty leadership training for CBE. This program is founded on the hypothesis that investment in faculty (& staff) strengthens everything: well-supported, productive faculty-staff relationship promotes efficiencies, shared governance of department, and transfers of wisdom and sharing of best practices, building of community & retention of people, fostering of research collaboration & innovation & winning centers. We will take an iterative approach in implanting this initiative with the specific aim of testing our assumptions and continuously refine our processes at all levels to maximize impacts. We anticipate that the lessons CBE learns in implementation of the initiative will be broadly important in changing culture across departments in Cornell Engineering and nationwide. To this end, CBE aims to collaborate with the College and other departments on the development and implementation of this initiative.

Develop a “living laboratory of CBE humans We propose to promote innovations in pedagogy in engineering by using Olin Hall as a living laboratory for a tenure-track education-focused research faculty member. This flagship initiative envisions a tenure-track/tenured faculty member focused on education research being an enabler of research that seeks to capitalize on untapped human resource, a faculty member who will play a key role in designing experiments in learning that will be conducted in Innovation Hubs (Priority1), and a faculty member who will be a key leader of educational research in federally funded centers. This initiative will build on the existing cohort of faculty working in education research at Cornell (Physics and Biology). CBE aims to collaborate with the College and other departments on the creation of a cluster of such faculty in COE that could prove to be a distinguishing characteristic of engineering at Cornell.