Overview - Chemical and Biological Engineering

To face the demands and challenges in modern industry, NYU-Poly’s Othmer-Jacobs Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering offers educational and research programs that follow current trends in novel molecules, advanced products and processes, as well as synthesis design and operation methodology.

Our mission is to develop graduates capable of contributing to the advancement of chemical and biological engineering. We strive to be at the forefront in selected areas of research, and design our educational programs to produce graduates who are well grounded in the fundamentals of their chosen discipline, skilled in state-of-the-art techniques, and able to understand the importance of new developments in their discipline in a global and societal context.

Among our graduates are alumni who have reached the highest levels in the corporate and academic worlds, including Dr. Joseph J. Jacobs, the founder of Jacobs Engineering Group, one of the world’s largest engineering companies, and Dr. Martin Perl who received his BS in chemical engineering at Polytechnic and won the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics.

Setting the Pace of Chemical and Biological Engineering

Biological systems and bio-based processes are fertile ground for new engineering challenges. At one end of the spectrum are health related items, which can include new pharmaceuticals, new drug delivery systems and artificial tissue. At the other end of the spectrum are commodity chemicals. For commodities, the advantages of bio-based processes include the use of renewable resources, the potential to develop safer, more environmentally friendly processes and, ultimately, greater cost effectiveness. The shift from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates is real, it is based on biology, and it is happening now.

A few years ago we expanded our educational program in chemical engineering to include biology as an essential component and as a source of emerging applications for our discipline. We meld — as seamlessly as possible — systems and processes of biological relevance into our engineering curriculum. We regard the systems-oriented, multi-scale approach to problems that is the hallmark of chemical engineering as our primary strength.

It is essential that our students remain strong in engineering. It is our belief that by exposing our students to biological and bio-process in addition to more conventional chemical processes, we will produce better, more versatile engineers.

As part of our new curriculum, we have introduced required courses in biology and biochemistry and are revising virtually all of our engineering courses to include biological applications and examples. Technical electives in the junior and senior year provide opportunities for elective courses, particularly new electives focusing on engineering in biology such as system biology, protein engineering, and drug delivery.

The Discipline, Then and Now

Chemical engineering came into being a little more than 100 years ago with the emergence of petroleum processing and a commensurate expansion of the chemical industry. Chemistry was clearly the enabling science of this new industry but the skills and abilities needed to make the industry flourish demanded and helped shape chemical engineering as a separate discipline.

Over the past 40 years, chemical engineering curricula have embraced an engineering science paradigm that spans from molecular level interactions and transformations to large-scale systems. Indeed, it is an appreciation of, and a willingness to work over, many decades of scale that is one of the unique traits of the chemical engineering discipline. This ability to adapt to work on many scales has allowed chemical engineers to have productive interactions with a wide range of other science and engineering disciplines and will be essential for the application of engineering principles to the increasingly popular biologically-based processes.