Month: March 2018

CLEMSON — A retired Greenville executive who has donated to organizations ranging from the Peace Center to First Presbyterian Church is turning his philanthropic attention to Clemson University, where he is providing the largest donation in history to the chemical and biomolecular engineering department.

William Sturgis and his wife, Martha Beth, are contributing $600,000 to create a distinguished professorship in the department. They plan to double their contribution in their will.

A faculty member who is selected for the professorship will be able to use funds generated by an endowment to support graduate and undergraduate students as they do research, learn about entrepreneurship and travel to national meetings where they can present their research to leaders in their field.

In a 37-year career, Sturgis served as executive vice president of worldwide packaging operations at W.R. Grace and president of its North American Cryovac Division.

Upon his retirement  in 1997, Sturgis received the Order of the Palmetto, the state’s highest honor, and a commendation from the state House of Representatives. He and his wife stayed in Greenville after his retirement.

Sturgis said he and his wife established the professorship because they wanted to do something for chemical engineering at Clemson, where he got his start studying under influential professor Charles E. Littlejohn Jr.

“The quality of the professors really makes the quality of the graduates,” he said. “If you’ve got the money to attract the top professors, you’re going to attract a lot of people who want to major in that particular area and go on and do well.”

David Bruce, chair of the department, said it is important to bring in great faculty who will inspire students.

The Sturgis contribution “will let us retain great faculty that we already have and be a beacon to bring in new faculty to the department,” Bruce said.

An announcement on which faculty member will receive the professorship is expected soon.

Sturgis, who grew up on a dairy farm in Rock Hill, has a long history with Clemson. His class started with 41 chemical engineering majors and he remembers that 12 graduated.

He received his Bachelor of Science from Clemson in 1957 and later graduated from the Advanced Management Program at Harvard University.

Sturgis returned to Clemson as an alumnus, where he is an emeritus member of the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences advisory board.

He previously served as president of the Clemson University Foundation at a time when the big issues were construction of the Madren Conference Center and the John E. Walker Sr. Golf Course.

He has also been a big supporter of packaging science at Clemson. In 1995, he was inducted into the Packaging Education Hall of Fame for starting the Clemson program. Sturgis donated lots of his time to launching the program and played a key role in steering a $2 million contribution for scholarships from Cryovac.

Sturgis began his engineering career by doing government contract work on airplane and rocket engines with Pratt & Whitney. What he really wanted at the time was a job in the paper business, which fit with the work he did in his senior thesis at Clemson, Sturgis said.

But he never got the paper job.

After about two years at Pratt & Whitney, Sturgis left and took a job with Cryovac when the company just was getting started.

“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to go to work with them and I’ll wait until I find the paper job that I want, then I’ll make a move,’” he said. “Well, I ended up staying with them for 37 years. Every time I thought it was about time to make a move, I’d get a raise and a promotion, and I just kept going.”

By the time Sturgis retired in 1997, he oversaw 16 plants around the world and about 18,000 employees, including 900 in Simpsonville alone, he said.

William and Martha Beth Sturgis have known each other since they were in the first grade. They started dating in the 11th grade at Rock Hill High School.

Martha Beth went to Winthrop University, majoring in elementary education, when William went to Clemson. They graduated on the same day in 1957.

“She has always been my partner,” William said. “When we needed to move somewhere, she was ready to pick up and go. She has always been 100 percent supportive.”

The couple has traveled the world together, setting foot on every continent except Antarctica. They have three sons, including twins, Randy and Rick, who are both Clemson graduates, and the youngest, Mark. Altogether, the couple has five grandsons and two granddaughters.

Martha Beth said she admires many traits in her husband, including that he is fair and that he had an open-door policy at Cryovac.

“We just celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary, so obviously I admire everything about him that I can admire,” she said. “He has been a wonderful husband, a wonderful provider, a wonderful father, a wonderful grandfather and, in June, he’s going to become a wonderful great-grandfather.”

They attribute the longevity of their relationship to commitment, understanding and communication.

In his philanthropic pursuits, Sturgis has been most involved at First Presbyterian Church in downtown Greenville, where he has served as deacon, elder and trustee, a position he has turned over to one of his sons.

He has also contributed to the Peace Center for the Performing Arts and served on its executive board. He has been involved in the Greenville Chamber of Commerce and been a member of the Downtown Rotary Club.

JoVanna King, senior associate vice president for development at Clemson, has worked with Sturgis for years and helped advise him on his latest contribution, officially titled the William B. “Bill” Sturgis, ‘57 & Martha Elizabeth “Martha Beth” Blackmon Sturgis Distinguished Professorship in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

“Bill understands the value of giving his time and treasure to his alma mater,” King said. “I am truly grateful and consider it a privilege to have worked with him all these years.”

The latest contribution includes a $500,000 endowment that is expected to generate investment returns that can be spent in accordance with the professorship. The remaining $100,000 provides five years of funding while the returns are accumulating.

Anand Gramopadhye, dean of the College of Engineering, Computing and Applied Sciences, said William and Martha Beth Sturgis are an inspiration.

“The college owes a heartfelt debt of gratitude to this couple for their tremendous generosity and visionary thinking,” Gramopadhye said. “In helping strengthen our faculty, they are helping shape the lives of students for generations to come.”

Written by Paul Alongi

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Steve Abel, Assistant Professor from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as a part of the ChBE Spring Seminar series. His seminar, titled “Antigen Recognition at Immune-Cell Surfaces: Probing the Role of Mechanical Forces,” will take place on Thursday, March 29th 2018 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

One of the central problems in immunology involves molecular recognition at cell-cell interfaces. T cells and B cells directly engage other cells and use surface receptors to identify molecular signatures of pathogens. Fascinating recent experiments have revealed that mechanical forces regulate processes by which T cells and B cells distinguish between self and foreign ligands, but a unifying theoretical framework is missing. In this work, we develop hybrid computational models that account for key biophysical properties of immune-cell interfaces, including stochastic receptor-ligand binding kinetics, membrane mechanics, and actin-mediated forces on the membrane. We use these models to investigate how mechanical forces modulate the interactions of T cells and B cells with surface-presented antigens. In the case of T cells, we characterize how receptor-ligand bond formation drives dynamic changes in membrane organization and shape, how these changes affect forces experienced by the bonds, and how these forces affect bond lifetimes. In the case of B cells, we show that the bending rigidity of the antigen-presenting membrane influences the affinity at which antigens are internalized through a mechanism involving receptor clustering and membrane invagination. We conclude by discussing our results in the context of antigen discrimination by T cells and B cells, and by highlighting open questions in mechanoimmunology that theoretical approaches can help to address.

Steve Abel received his undergraduate education at Rice University, where he earned a B.S. in Chemical Physics, a B.A. in Mathematics, and a B.A. in Physics. He received a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University and was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His graduate research focused on developing theoretical methods to describe the highly correlated motion of molecules in dense liquids. His postdoctoral work applied theory and computation to understand how T cells, the primary orchestrators ofadaptive immunity, identify and respond to pathogens. This work was carried out in close collaboration with experimentalists, with a particular emphasis on understanding how the membrane environment influences signal
transduction in cells. Dr. Abel’s group currently investigates fundamental problems in cell biology and immunology using theoretical and computational methods. They study processes involving signal transduction networks, cell membranes, and the cytoskeleton, with specific interests including antigen recognition and lymphocyte activation, motor-driven intracellular transport, stochasticity in biochemical reaction networks, and soft biological materials.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Reginald Rogers, Assistant Professor from the Rochester Institute of Technology, as a part of the ChBE Spring Seminar series. His seminar, titled “Got Clean Water? How Carbon Nanomaterials Play a Role in Achieving this Grand Challenge,” will take place on Thursday, March 15th, 2018 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Water is considered to be the most precious commodity on the planet, and one that needs to be treated with respect. With the ever growing world population, there is an increasing need to develop new materials and systems that can potential improve the quality of water on longer time scales. Newly emerged nanomaterials, such as graphene or carbon nanotubes, are of increasingly widespread importance in environmental remediation, especially in their ability to remove undesirable chemicals from hydrological systems. In this presentation, an in-depth overview of the use of next generation carbon-based nanomaterials for adsorption applications will be discussed. Aqueous-phase adsorption of multiple organic compounds and heavy metal ions at environmentally relevant concentrations by granular activated carbon and graphene-single- walled carbon nanotube free-standing hybrid papers will be presented. Results show that the hybrid nanocomposites have superior adsorption capacities compared to bulk carbonaceous materials with up to 35% and 170% larger uptakes towards aromatic and ionic compounds, respectively. In addition, the use of highly porous, lightweight aerogels as adsorbents of high bonding affinity for a large variety of chemicals provide opportunities for enhanced separation processes. In particular, the nature and the amount of nanostructures (graphene, multi-walled or single-walled carbon nanotubes) along with their dispersion state throughout the carbonaceous matrix strongly influence the adsorption properties of the aerogel. Finally, an outlook on the use of sorted carbon nanotubes for adsorption applications will be shared.

Dr. Reginald E. Rogers is an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology.  He is head of the Nanoscale Energy and Separation Materials Laboratory (NESML).  Dr. Rogers and his group have been involved in a variety of projects investigating the separation of organic and inorganic compounds from aqueous environments using carbon-based nanomaterials.  Dr. Rogers also has projects focused on the development of cathode materials for sodium ion batteries. He has served as a co-author on over 25 research papers and has presented at many national conferences. Dr. Rogers has been recognized for his teaching, research, and service contributions with numerous awards and recognitions. Notable awards include the 2016 Richard and Virginia Eisenhart Provost’s Award for Excellence in Teaching from RIT, the 2017 Henry C. McBay Outstanding Teacher Award from the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, the 2017 Emerging Investigator honor by Environmental Science: Water Research Camp; Technology from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and most recently, the 2018 Dr. Janice A. Lumpkin Educator of the Year Award from the National Society of Black Engineers.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the Office of Inclusion and Equity sponsored travel grants for students to attend the 2017 NOBCChE Conference, which was held in Minneapolis.    After attending the conference, undergrad students, Deidra Ward and Mikhala Cooper, believed that a student chapter of the organization would be beneficial for Clemson’s campus. NOBCChE, or the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers, is an organization dedicated to building an eminent cadre of people of color in science and technology. The formation of a student chapter at Clemson would serve as a means for fostering diversity and minority retention in chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields at the university.

Recently, the organization held their first general body meeting where they highlighted the goals of the organization and how this organization will benefit those who decide to join. They also elected members for their executive board. NOBCChE will serve as a catalyst for networking, leadership development, and professional development. It will also allow for minority students studying chemistry, chemical engineering, and related fields to fellowship.

For more information on NOBCChE, contact Deidra Ward, President deidraw@g.clemson.edu or Mikhala Cooper, Vice President khasahc@g.clemson.edu

Executive Board Members:   Jasmine Pringle (Treasurer), DeJanique Bradshaw (Social Media Coordinator), Deidra Ward (President), Mikhala Cooper (Vice President), Johnathan O’Neil (Secretary), and Rashaun Rush (Campus Representative).

Last month, the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering hosted approximately 70 middle school students during the PEER/WISE 2018 STEM Day.  ChBE Graduate and undergraduate students taught the middle school-aged kids how chemical engineers safely use and make thermal energy through chemical reactions. Students learned about redox reactions by electroplating a nickel plate with copper (where thermal energy is required for the reaction to occur) and a combustion reaction after generating hydrogen and oxygen gases to fuel a pipet rocket (where thermal energy is generated by the combustion of hydrogen and oxygen gases).   Once again, the participating students and parents raved that the ChBE activity was a favorite of their day.

During the 2017-2018 school year, Matthew Brabender was awarded an undergraduate student research fellowship through the South Carolina Space Grant Consortium (SCSGC), which will enable him to continue his ongoing research with Dr. Mark Blenner in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department.  The SCSGC was created through the National Space Grant Act of 1988 and funds a variety of programs that promote research, education, and public service activities related to NASA.

Limited storage capacity during long-term space missions establishes a need to recycle waste products in outer space. One possible method for reducing waste accumulation involves converting human waste into value-added products. The first project Matthew worked on examined the possibility of utilizing human urine as an alternative nitrogen source to culture the yeast Yarrowia lipolytica. Through his research, he concluded that human urine is a feasible nitrogen source for Y. lipolytica biomass and lipid accumulation. Lipids can be used for the manufacture of a variety of products, including nutraceuticals. More information on this project can be found in the article, “Urea and urine are a viable and cost-effective nitrogen source for Yarrowia lipolytica biomass and lipid accumulation”.

Matthew is currently working on a project involving the production of fatty alcohols with Y. lipolytica. Fatty alcohols are used in the production of detergents and surfactants.   With the help of fellow researchers and his advisor, Matthew is trying to engineer a strain of Y. lipolytica that produces high yields of fatty alcohols. Once this is accomplished, he will attempt to grow the strain with human urine as a nitrogen source and cyanobacteria as a carbon source.    If successful, this would allow for the sustainable production of fatty alcohols and could prove highly useful in resource limited environments.

To view a related article about Dr. Mark Blenner’s Research Group, please go to this link:

http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/urine-space-and-need-new-parts-researchers-breathe-life-into-space-made-objects/

At the November AIChE Conference, undergraduate student Hansen Mou accepted the Donald F. Othmer Sophomore Academic Excellence Award. The Donald F. Othmer Sophomore Academic Excellence Award is presented to one AIChE student member in each student chapter who has attained the highest scholastic grade-point average during his/her freshman and sophomore years, on recommendation of the Student Chapter Advisor.

In addition to this achievement, Mou won second place for his poster presentation at the 2017 National AICHE Meeting. He took part in the Materials section of the competition, which had 90 posters competing. The poster was titled “Reinforcement of Magnesium Oxychloride Cement Composites Using Short Carbon and Aramid Fibers.”

Mou is an extremely involved undergraduate student in our department, with his leadership in the AICHE chapter, ChemE Car Team Captain, and International REU in Germany on Alternative Energy this past summer. For the last two years, Mou has been working with Dr. Chris Kitchens and his research group. Their research has focused on the reinforcement of a type of cement material called magnesium oxychloride cement, or MOC for short. This type of cement is of interest because it is overall stronger and exhibits better insulation and fire resistance properties as compared with the more common Portland cement. The current industry standard for strengthening this material is through adding woven glass fibers to the outside of a block of MOC. However, since this method requires this material to take the form of rectangular blocks, his team investigated adding fibers within the cement itself, hoping to open up more possible uses for this material while still reinforcing it.

Mou tried several types of fibers at different amounts, and narrowed it down to standard modulus carbon fiber, intermediate modulus carbon fiber, and aramid fiber, as listed on his poster (modulus refers to stiffness, so intermediate modulus fiber is stiffer than standard modulus fiber). Among those, he found that the most reinforcement came from adding 0.3% weight of intermediate modulus carbon fiber, increasing the flexural strength of cement by 21.4%.

The Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering welcomes Dr. Amy Karlsson, Assistant Professor from the University of Maryland’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, as a part of the ChBE Spring Seminar series. Her seminar, titled “Engineering Peptides to Target Fungal Pathogens,” will take place on Thursday, March 8th, 2018 from 2:00-3:00pm in Earle 100.

Protein engineering offers powerful approaches to designing proteins and peptides as molecular tools for a wide range of biological applications. Our lab uses engineered proteins and peptides to study biological systems and design improved therapeutics and diagnostics. One focus of our work is engineering peptides for improved interactions with Candida fungal pathogens. C. albicans and other Candida species are human commensal organisms but can cause disease when patients are immunocompromised. Increasing drug resistance and the limited number of available antifungal agents necessitate the search for new therapeutic strategies. To address current therapeutic challenges, we are improving the properties of the human salivary peptide histatin 5, which has antifungal activity against C. albicans. Although histatin 5 has promise as a therapeutic agent, the fungus produces secreted aspartic proteases that degrade the peptide and reduce its antifungal activity. Our analogs of histatin 5 offer strong resistance to the fungal proteases without reducing antifungal activity. We are investigating the use of these analogs for treating and preventing disease, while also improving understanding of how the secreted aspartic proteases recognize and cleave peptide substrates. In addition to exploring peptides as potential therapeutics, we are also using peptides to target and deliver bioactive molecules to Candida pathogens. We are examining how properties of these cell-penetrating peptides affect their translocation across the cell wall and cell membrane of Candida cells and are defining the types of cargo that can be delivered into fungal cells. By applying protein engineering strategies to designing peptides for targeted interactions with fungal cells, we are gaining information on structure-function relationships that will enable more efficient design of biomolecules for specific interactions with biological systems.

Dr. Amy J. Karlsson received her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Iowa State University in 2003 and then joined Prof. Sean Palecek’s group at the University of Wisconsin, where she received her PhD in chemical engineering in 2009. Following her doctoral work, she was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow in Prof. Matt DeLisa’s lab at Cornell University. Dr. Karlsson joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Maryland as an assistant professor in 2012. Her group’s research lies at the interface of biology and engineering and uses protein engineering strategies to improve the understanding of human diseases and develop tools for drug design and disease diagnosis.