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ASEE ChED Newsletter – October 2025

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Lorena Grundy
University of Pennsylvania
Communications Co-Chair

Hello Everyone! It’s an interesting time to be in higher education – at Penn and eight other universities, we’re responding to the recent Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education sent out by the federal government. Elsewhere, we all continue to be affected by funding cuts, changes in visa policies, accreditation, and ideological intrusions on academic freedom and freedom of speech. ChED is an incredible source of support for all of us who are dedicated to expanding equitable, accessible chemical engineering education for all of our students, and I’m so grateful to be a part of this community!

I hope to see many of you at AIChE in just a few weeks, and even more at ASEE next June. The 2026 ASEE conference will be in Charlotte, North Carolina, and abstract submission is open now – the deadline is this week, OCTOBER 15th, 2025.

– Lorena Grundy (Communications Co-Chair)

Summary of Announcements

  1. 2026 Annual Meeting: Abstracts due October 15, 2025
  2. Review ASEE submissions for ChED!
  3. ASEE PreK-12 Teacher Conference in Charlotte: June 20
  4. Engineering Education at the AIChE Annual Meeting: November 2-5
  5. ASEE Videos on Improving Engineering Teacher Professional Development
  6. Call for Participation in AIChE Education Division Survey on Assessment
  7. JEE Peer Reviewing Skills Workshop: October 21
  8. Chemical Engineering Outreach Discussions
  9. Teaching Focused Faculty Survey
  10. Call for Study Participants on Teaming Skills and Attitudes
  11. Fellowship in Honor of Daniel Lepek

To submit announcements to future newsletters: Please send announcements to ched.ASEE.newsletter@gmail.com. We send newsletters mid-month, so try to submit announcements by the 10th of the month (November 10 for the next newsletter). Thank you!

Detailed Announcements

2026 Annual Meeting: Abstracts due October 15, 2025

The ChED executive committee is inviting you to submit papers for the 2026 Annual Conference and Exposition in Charlotte, North Carolina (June 21 – 24, 2025). More information can be found here. Please note the following deadlines:

  • October 15, 2025: Abstract submissions due 
  • January 21, 2026: Draft papers due
  • February 18, 2026: Revised papers due
  • April 29, 2026: Final papers due

Review ASEE submissions for ChED!

If you would like to review abstract submissions for the division, please fill out this brief form.

ASEE PreK-12 Teacher Conference in Charlotte: June 20

The ASEE PreK-12 Teacher Conference in Charlotte will be June 20, immediately before the main ASEE conference. Join the PreK-12 mailing list.

Engineering Education at the AIChE Annual Meeting: November 2-5

If you are attending the AIChE Annual Meeting in Boston in November, check out the Education Division’s events. In particular, new and prospective faculty may be interested in the effective teaching workshop led by our own ChED members Janie Brennan, Daniel Burkey, and Courtney Pfluger on November 2: more information can be found on the Effective Teaching for New or Prospective Faculty flier.

ASEE Videos on Improving Engineering Teacher Professional Development

Resource announcement: ASEE has put together a five-part video series on YouTube about how to improve engineering teacher professional development.

Call for Participation in AIChE Education Division Survey on Assessment

We represent an AIChE Education Division survey team, looking to determine if and how alternative assessment is being used by chemical engineering faculty. Please consider completing this survey on your current assessment practices: https://neu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_74BhjeshS3xI0po

We want to gather data from faculty who may not have used alternative assessment in any form as well.  We would appreciate you distributing this survey to all your faculty colleagues for us to develop a broader evaluation of alternative assessment’s use, successes, and challenges in chemical engineering. If you have any questions, please contact Luke Landherr (l.landherr@northeastern.edu).

JEE Peer Reviewing Skills Workshop: October 21

Join JEE Co-Editors-in-Chief David Knight (Virginia Tech) and Joyce Main (Purdue) for an essential webinar on developing constructive peer reviewing skills in engineering education on October 21, 2025 at 10:00 AM PT / 1:00 PM ET.

Perfect for graduate students and new community members looking to understand the peer review process, learn what editors and authors need most, and build networks in engineering education. Register now for the JEE Peer Reviewing Skills Workshop.

Chemical Engineering Outreach Discussions

ChED is hosting monthly Zoom meetings to highlight best practices in Chemical Engineering Outreach (30-minute presentation, followed by discussion).  If you would like to participate and/or present, please email tbayles@pitt.edu!

Teaching Focused Faculty Survey

The AIChE teaching focused faculty (TFF) group is looking to grow its leadership and to get input from TFFs. If you are TFF, please fill out this the Teaching Focused Faculty Survey.

Call for Study: Participants on Teaming Skills and Attitudes

The research study titled “Measurement of Engineering Teaming Skills and Attitudes” is investigating the types of skills and attitudes engineering students develop on teams. Potential benefits of this important research study include: helping us better understand the types of skills and attitudes engineering students have, and how they develop.

The researchers are looking specifically to solicit feedback on their current framework by conducting a Delphi study. You may volunteer to participate in this study if you are (or have in the past been) a college-level engineering educator (adjunct, lecturer, professor, etc.) who has taught undergraduate engineering students. Your participation will require you to take a 15-20 minute survey three times via Qualtrics. These surveys will occur once a month for three months time.

There is no monetary compensation for your participation. Please contact Justin Major (majorj@rowan.edu; Rowan University) or Dr. Richard Cimino (cimino@njit.edu; New Jersey Institute of Technology) if you wish to participate in this Delphi study. Additionally, please feel free to share this information with your academic colleagues who may also be interested in participating!

This study has been approved by Rowan University’s IRB (Study PRO-2023-223).

To participate, please take the first survey for the “Measurement of Engineering Teaming Skills and Attitudes” survey.

Fellowship in Honor of Daniel Lepek

Professor Daniel Lepek passed away about two years ago on May 26th, 2023; he was an excellent colleague, a dedicated and innovative instructor, a brilliant and accomplished researcher, a caring advisor, and a great friend; we are all still getting used to him not being with us. 

Current students at Cooper Union never got to have him; we want to help keep his memory alive by endowing a masters fellowship. 

Here’s a link to the fellowship donation page. All donations will eventually be given to graduate students here at Cooper.  Please consider helping us keep Daniel connected to the Cooper community, a place he loved so much and dedicated his entire career to.

ASEE ChED Newsletter – September 2025 – Awards Edition

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 A Message from the Chair

Taryn Bayles
University of Pittsburgh
ChED Chair, 2025-2026

Hello Everyone,

I hope your fall semester is off to a great start!

It was such a pleasure to see many of you in Montreal—thank you for helping to make the conference a meaningful and successful gathering. Please join me in extending a heartfelt thank you to Chris Barr, who did double duty as both our Program Chair and Banquet Chair. His leadership and hard work were instrumental in making this year’s conference truly memorable.

I would also like to recognize our outgoing chair, Janie Brennan, for her thoughtful and dedicated leadership over the past year. Janie’s contributions have left a lasting impact on our division.

To all our authors, presenters, and session chairs—thank you. Your work continues to inspire our community and drive meaningful dialogue in chemical engineering education. Special thanks as well to our Awards Committee for organizing the judging process and to our Fundraising Committee, whose efforts helped make the monetary awards possible.

I encourage you to read about the award winners and the award-winning papers featured in our newsletter and to consider nominating a colleague for next year’s awards. Details are available on our division website.

Looking ahead, planning is already underway for the ASEE Annual Conference 2026 in Charlotte, NC! The Call for Papers has been released, and abstract submission opens this week—deadline: October 15. We hope you will consider contributing and sharing your work with our community.

We also invite you to join our ChED Outreach Discussion Series, held monthly via Zoom on the fourth Thursday from 2:00–3:00 PM (Eastern). Our first session will be on September 25, featuring Joanne Beckwith Maddock from Carnegie Mellon University, who will share insights from her longstanding work in rural communities. To receive the Zoom link, please contact me at tbayles@pitt.edu.

A big thank you to Lorena Grundy and Monika Crowl for their excellent work putting together this newsletter! If you have suggestions, ideas, or would like to get more involved with ChED, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Wishing you all a productive and fulfilling semester. I look forward to seeing many of you at the AIChE Annual Meeting in Boston!

ChEers, Taryn Bayles

Awards Newsletter

Click on image for PDF of newsletter.

ASEE ChED Newsletter – June 2025 – Conference Edition

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 A Message from the Outgoing Chair

Janie Brennan
Washington University in St. Louis
ChED Chair, 2024-2025

To my friends and colleagues in the ASEE Chemical Engineering Division (ChED),

Another academic year has passed, and it’s almost time again for our annual conference — this time outside the US in Montreal! I am so excited to visit and explore this beautiful city, especially knowing that we’ll have some fantastic programming and events thanks to the diligent efforts of Program Chair Chris Barr and Program Co-Chair Eric Husmann, with some initial legwork by Local Arrangements Chair Brenden Moeun. In addition to the joys of connecting and re-connecting with many of you, I’m also looking forward to learning from you all at the slate of excellent talks and sessions we have planned – check out the later pages of this newsletter for details!

In addition to the aforementioned conference information, we have more news of importance. Our elections were recently concluded resulting in some terrific additions to your Division leadership (see page 2). As a bonus for those attending, you’ll have the opportunity to meet those officers (and other members) that you don’t already know. While the scholarly aspect of our meeting is important, I have always believed that the opportunity to engage with our colleagues was the real value-add of attendance. So do not hesitate to reach out and meet a few new people while at the conference.

If you are newer to ChED or haven’t previously attended in person, I hope you will find, as I have all these years, that our group is welcoming and supportive to those of all backgrounds. I encourage you to seek us out and engage in our board games hangout (Sunday) or any of our Tuesday events: the business meeting, the Open Mic Session, and/or the awards banquet. If nothing else, we’d be glad to meet you at Sunday’s Division Mixer to tell you more about how you can better connect with our community. And if, after hanging out with us, you find you want to contribute more, just let any of the current officers know. There are always opportunities for those who are interested in serving!

Speaking of service, we have some newly elected officers (see pg. 2) to our Division. I am thrilled to see how they will (continue to) contribute their strengths and ideas to our community. I am grateful to our current officers for all of their hard work – particularly to Ashlee Ford-Versypt and Margot Vigeant (awards co-chairs) and Fernando Merida and Bernie VanWie (fundraising co-chairs) – it is through their hard efforts that we can continue to recognize and cherish the excellence in our field (e.g., Lisa Bullard with the Woods Lectureship for Lifetime Achievement). I would also be remiss if I didn’t thank all of the paper reviewers who made publication of all of these excellent conference papers possible!

This is my final newsletter message as the Chair of ChED, and I find I am unable to conclude without acknowledging the upheaval in American academia. From the cancellation of programs supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion, to uncertainty around and cancellation of critical research funding, to intimidation of international scholars, to all other manner of attack on intellectual honesty and truth, I know I have been deeply concerned about what the future holds. Even if you are in support of some of the recent happenings, I hope you can see and understand the pain and anxiety of many of our peers, students, and friends. In these times, one bright spot I continue to hold onto almost daily is my connection with the ChED community. Whether through research collaborations, the Teaching with AI book club, or even apps like Duolingo or Finch, you remind me that there are many people out there working to create a better world for all through our little lens of chemical engineering education. Every day, we can each do just a little bit to help care for ourselves, our students, our universities, our families, and our world – and all of those little bits add up.

It has been an absolute honor to be Chair for this Division that I love so much. You have all given me so much, and it has been a delight to give back in what little way I can. As we move into this next year of ASEE programming, I can think of no better colleagues than Taryn Bayles (incoming Chair) and Neha Raikar (incoming Chair-Elect). I know they will lead with empathy and wisdom.

Looking forward to see many of you in Montreal!

ChEers,

Janie Brennan

2024-2025 ASEE ChED Chair

Conference Newsletter

Click on image for PDF of newsletter.

ASEE ChED Newsletter – Spring 2025 – Election Special

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A Message from the Chair-Elect

Taryn Bayles
University of Pittsburgh
Chair-Elect, 2024-2025

The past three months have brought significant and challenging changes to our academic landscape — from budget cuts and hiring freezes to the cancellation of conference travel, the elimination of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and growing uncertainty around tariffs. Campus closures and shifting priorities have made this a particularly unsettling time to be in academia.

Yet, amidst this turbulence, I hope we can refocus on what continues to make our work worthwhile and impactful: our students. As the semester draws to a close, let’s take time to celebrate their hard work and accomplishments. Whether they’re heading to graduate school, starting a new job, beginning a summer internship, co-op, or REU, each step forward marks a meaningful milestone worth honoring.I’m also very much looking forward to seeing many of you at the annual conference — a time to reconnect, share knowledge, and draw inspiration from one another. This year’s theme, “Engineering Educators Bringing the World Together,” is especially timely. It underscores the importance of collaboration and knowledge-sharing as we prepare future engineers to tackle increasingly complex global challenges.

I’m deeply grateful to all our members who volunteered their time to review abstracts and papers and offer thoughtful feedback. A special thank you to Chris Barr for curating an excellent technical program and awards banquet, and to Janie Brennan for her steadfast leadership this past year. Janie guided our division with dedication, particularly in supporting DEI-related work and ensuring the safety of those contributing to this essential area. She also led an engaging, year-long book club centered on Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning.

Finally, a warm thank you to Monika Crowl and Lorena Grundy, who generously assembled this issue of our newsletter, which includes information on this year’s election candidates. Please take a moment to review the slate and cast your vote using the link provided.

J’ai hâte de vous voir à Montréal bientôt!

ChEers,

Taryn

Special Election Newsletter

Vote via Qualtrics by Friday, May 9, 2025!

Click the image below for the PDF of the full 10 page newsletter, including candidate statements.