When Sankaran Sundaresan shifted to emeritus status at Princeton University in July, it marked a new phase in his professional life after 45 years – work that began after he earned his doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering.
Sundar, as he’s more commonly known to friends, racked up an impressive list of external awards during his time at Princeton. He won the 1999 R.H. Wilhelm Award in Chemical Reaction Engineering, the 2005 Thomas Baron Award in Fluid-Particle Systems, and the 2022 Elsevier Particle Technology Forum Award for Lifetime Achievements from the AIChE. He also earned a Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, and the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award.
However, the internal awards he received for teaching and the success of his students were equally important to him. At Princeton, he received the Engineering Council Award for Excellence in Teaching multiple times, the SEAS Distinguished Teacher Award and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was also recognized as an excellent mentor for his graduate students, and he received the Graduate Mentoring Award from the university as well.
For Sundar, it was his interest in learning that motivated him in the lab, and that it what he wanted to impart to his students. These were principals that were strengthened in his time at the University of Houston. We asked Sundar about his experiences at UH, and he was happy to share with us.
When it came to considering places to pursue a graduate degree, what made UH so appealing to you?
The Chemical Engineering Department at UH was rated as one of the top 10 chemical engineering departments in the United States at that time. The reputation of the UH Chemical Engineering Faculty and their research projects were important factors in my decision.
Also, the weather in Houston is not very different from that in India (except for a couple of months in the winter), which I found attractive.
Students from various Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) campuses had gone to study in that department in earlier years and recommended the department enthusiastically. These students did very well in their studies, which helped establish a very favorable reputation for students from the IITs. Five students (including me) from IITs joined the department in the Fall of 1976, three of whom were my Chemical Engineering classmates at IIT-Madras. Knowing that I would continue to be in the middle of my friends from my undergraduate days helped alleviate the anxiety of going abroad.
Learning that UH had a sizable Indian Student body, an active Indian Student Association and a very engaging International Student Organization added to my confidence that I would have plenty of help while I adjusted to studying in a new country.
In a story from Princeton highlighting some of your career accomplishments, Dr. Neal Amundson is mentioned. Was he someone at UH someone you looked to for professional guidance and development? Were there others in the department that were formative in your academic growth?
Professor Neal Amundson joined the Chemical Engineering department in Fall 1976. When I applied for admission and then accepted the offer, I did not know that he would be there to teach us a course and offer thesis projects. I was interested in the research of Professors Dan Luss, James Bailey, Abraham Dukler and Alkiviades Payatakes, and I was curious to learn about the research in a few other groups. After going to Houston and listening to the thesis projects offered by the professors, I ended up choosing Professor Amundson as my first choice.
Several professors influenced my professional growth while at UH. My advisor, Neal Amundson, took a hands-off approach to supervision which allowed me to explore, make mistakes and learn.
Professor Dan Luss had a huge impact as well. My office was in the Luss Plaza. I learned a lot about research and academic career by talking with him. I could not attend Dan Luss’s retirement celebration. However, I recorded a short speech which was played at the banquet. [Editor’s Note: See the full text of Sundar’s remarks here.]
You can see how much UH Chemical Engineering (especially under the leadership of Dan Luss) went to help me develop my communication skills. Some of the ideas for my early projects at Princeton emerged by watching Dan Luss and a visiting professor run experiments in the Luss Plaza.
Were there things at UH you learned, about yourself or teaching or research, that you kept in mind while you were at Princeton?
I served as a teaching assistant for several professors: Neal Amundson, Dan Luss and James Bailey. I learned much from their teaching styles, allowing me to develop my approach, which served me well in my Princeton career. What I gathered through the TA experiences and reflecting on the courses that I took at Houston – Be thoroughly prepared for every lecture, connect the homework problems to the principal ideas, and prepare fair exams!
All through my education, I was drawn to mathematics, and my exposure to hands-on experimental work was limited. I felt safer with computational graduate research than experimental work. As I was getting increasingly interested in an academic career, I started to learn a bit more about the experimental work that my fellow graduate students were doing, with the hope that it would make me less uncomfortable to think about experimental projects in my academic career.
I mentioned this to Dan Luss. He insisted that the best way to get comfortable with experiments is to do a few. He had an experimental setup to study steady-state multiplicity that was not being used at that time. He asked me to spend some time planning and running some experiments, which I did. Although no publishable results came out of that effort, it gave me an initial exposure to experiments. It allowed me to embark on research that combined experiments with theory, modeling and computations at Princeton.
While I was at UH, I had the opportunity to think about and work on a few problems that was not related to my dissertation. In addition to Dan Luss, I worked with Neal Amundson and Gus Aris on dispersion in packed beds, which led to a publication; with Raymond Flumerfelt on bubble coalescence; and with Roy Jackson on a different approach to analyzing dispersion in packed beds, which also led to a publication.
Working on different projects in this manner gave me the confidence to focus on identifying important and interesting projects to work on and not be constrained by my range of expertise. I felt confident that I can learn what I need to.
Looking back, I have taught at Princeton 17 different courses and have done research on a range of topics – catalysis, catalytic reaction engineering, single phase and different kinds of multiphase flows, separation, thermodynamics… In no small way, my time at UH contributed to the courage to teach and research broadly.
Have you had many chances to come back to Houston and the campus? If so, how has your opinion of the College changed?
I explored the possibility of moving to the University of Houston a couple of times. However, it did not develop to an offer in any of these visits. I visited the campus on those occasions.
I also had the honor of delivering the Neal Amundson Lecture in 2010. I read about the progress in the Cullen College of Engineering and the Willian Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering through their newsletters.
I believe that all the departments in the Cullen College have seen a significant growth in their stature over the past five decades. The faculty are addressing a remarkable variety of projects, bringing in innovative ideas.
An honorary session for Sundaresan's 70th birthday and retirement will be held at the AIChE Annual Meeting 2025 in Boston on Monday, Nov. 3 from 12:30 p.m. to 3 p.m. For more information, visit the conference website.