Northwestern Chemical & Biological Engineering

Friendly reminder that our PhD application deadline is this Monday, December 1st! We will accept applications until 11:59pm on Monday. You can find our application and frequently asked admissions questions here: mccormick.northwestern.edu/chemical-biolo…

Congrats to Justin Notestein on recently being named a 2025 recipient of the Masahiro and Eiko Meshii Award that honors faculty members for excellence in design education!

Welcome to Krishna @shrinivaslab of @nu_chbe for today’s Phase Group meeting! He is discussing design of dynamic biomolecular ensembles 🔬

Thanks to everyone who attended our 19th Annual Richard S.H. Mah Lecture series and reception with guest speaker David Sholl from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory!

Wastewater treatment plants emit far more methane and nitrous oxide than previously thought. Professor Jennifer Dunn found ways to cut these emissions cheaply—advancing climate goals and cleaner water systems worldwide. spr.ly/6019AsrqS

A research team with Professor Krishna Shrinivas developed a machine learning framework to design flexible proteins that don’t fold into a fixed shape. The approach could enable new therapies and synthetic biology breakthroughs. spr.ly/6013AqH6V

🎉 Northwestern’s Center for Synthetic Biology is celebrating 10 years of innovation, collaboration, and impact! From reprogramming biology to launching startups, CSB has transformed ideas into breakthroughs. Join us for a year of celebration ➡️ tinyurl.com/4mvuudce

Thrilled to share our latest in @NatComputSci ! Led by the fantastic @RyanKrue + collab with @BrennerGroup1 — we introduce a framework to design intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) from physics-based simulations. 🧬 doi.org/10.1038/s43588… 📰seas.harvard.edu/news/2025/10/o…

Congratulations to all our 2025 student award winners! Distinguished Graduate Researcher Awards: Courtney Smoljan, Meagan Olsen (R/U) & Dylan Brown (R/U) Distinguished Trainee Service Awards: Sapna Ramesh & Hongjun Park TA Awards: Dachey Lin (ChE 421) & Kevin Yao (ChE 210)

The department reunited at Camp Cheebie for their annual retreat to kick off the school year! We heard presentations from Distinguished Graduate Researchers and new faculty, tie-dyed t-shirts, faced off in field games, and ended the day with s'mores at the lakeside fire pit.

A few highlights from our 2nd Annual CSB Open House. We're grateful for the energy and curiosity of the 85+ attendees who stopped by to learn more about our center and faculty research. Here's to future collaboration!

Northwestern Engineering’s Jeffrey Lopez is one of five recipients of a 2025-26 Electrochemical Society (ECS) Toyota Young Investigator Fellowship for innovative projects in green energy technology. Congrats, Jeff! spr.ly/6019AGCGL

The Postdoc committee hosted a picnic at Centennial Park to bond with colleagues and welcome new postdocs to the department, including Dr. Feipeng Chen in the Tullman-Ercek and Wang labs and Dr. Yong Wang in the Lopez lab!

Congrats to the Dunn group on taking home awards for best student poster (Jenesis Cochrane, 2nd year PhD) and best student presentation (Maggie O'Connell, 5th year PhD) at ISSST last month!

CSB is thrilled to welcome our incredible summer undergrad researchers! 🎉🔬Thanks to @NSF, the DeFeo Family Foundation & Walder Foundation for supporting hands-on exploration in #SyntheticBiology. Here's to a summer of curiosity, growth & innovation! #STEM #UndergradResearch

From June 30-July 2 in Evanston, the Diffusion Fundamentals Conference will bring together researchers across disciplines to discuss advances in diffusion-related science, from materials and thermal transport to biological systems and complex networks. spr.ly/60174w4HZ

Congratulations, @Kriegmerica!

Congrats to senior Cecilia Barr (Lopez lab) on winning McCormick's Harold B. Gotaas Award for her excellence in research! Cecilia's research is focused on finding PFAS free alternatives for high performance Li metal battery electrolytes.

Professors Jeffrey Richards and Jeffrey Lopez embrace concurrent materials design to improve sustainability in manufacturing and battery design. spr.ly/6017NflTt

Professor Linsey Seitz has been selected as one of the 19 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars for 2025. Seitz will use the unrestricted $100,000 grant to advance her sustainable electrocatalytic research. Congrats, Linsey! spr.ly/6010Nyw5C