The University of Houston Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) has received $90,000 grant from the Bayer Foundation to establish the Bayer Graduate Fellowship Program at the Cullen College of Engineering.
The fellowship will be awarded over three years to a graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree in chemical engineering. The recipient will be selected among a pool of second-year graduate students seeking to complete his or her studies.
"We are extremely grateful to the Bayer Foundation for this grant," said Mike Harold, chairman of the CHBE department. "The University of Houston Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is committed to producing doctoral students who have been educated in the fundamentals of our field and who have used that knowledge to carry out pioneering research. By establishing this fellowship, Bayer is helping us further this commitment."
Last week, a group from the foundation visited with the department to discuss its graduate programs and tour selected research labs. The group included Willy Scherf, president and CEO of Bayer Corporate and Business Services; Thomas Daszkowski, director of process technology for Bayer Technology Services; John Danchisko, HR/business partner of Bayer Corporate and Business Services; Rich Guhl, manager of engineering for Bayer Technology Services; Lauren Trocano, senior communications representative for Bayer Corporate and Business Services; and Kirk Wilson, head of Bayer Technology Services Americas.
"We are extremely pleased to make this gift to the University of Houston, an institution whose chemical and biomolecular engineering department is consistently placed among the top echelon in the United States for the quality of its faculty, their scholarship and research projects, as well as the quality and number of Ph.D. engineering students it graduates each year," said Scherf.
Gregory S. Babe, president and CEO of Bayer MaterialScience, adds, "As a leading producer of polymers and high-performance plastics, we at Bayer MaterialScience are also impressed with the department's particular strengths in the areas of chemical reaction engineering, process engineering and control, and mathematical modeling," he said. "We are very aware of the fact that the growth of biotechnology and materials, including polymeric and bio- or plant-based materials, is producing a new group of graduates highly skilled in specialty products spanning polymers and biomaterials and that many of these graduates are coming out the University of Houston CHBE program."