Chemical & Environmental Engineering

A Message From The Department Chair

Welcome to the Department of Chemical & Environmental Engineering (CEE). Our undergraduate program in chemical engineering and environmental engineering started in 1990-1991 with about a dozen of students and 1 faculty member, and graduate program in 1999 with 7 students and 8 faculty members. Today we have 178 undergraduate students and 79 graduate students and 14 faculty members. We are proud of our tremendous growth in the past 10-15 years, but we are even more proud of the high quality education we have been offering to our undergraduate and graduate students. In addition to the state of the art instructional facilities, our undergraduate students have ample opportunities to get involved in hands-on researches in our faculty research labs. Our graduate students have been engaged daily in performing leading edge researches that are critical to our society's needs of clean air, fresh water, sustainable energy, and security. These fields of applications are supported by our six core research competencies in Air quality engineering, Water quality engineering, Biotechnology, Materials and nanotechnology, Energy systems, and Theory and molecular modeling. Our faculty has been productive in carrying out high-impact research. Our faculty obtained about $10 millions research funding in the fiscal year 2007-2008. Our faculty has a collective h-index of 54 for articles published between 2000 and 2008, an average citation per paper of 20, and a number of papers per faculty per year of 5. These numbers put CEE faculty among top 15 chemical engineering and environmental engineering programs ranked by the US News and World Report. In fact, our US News and World Report ranking has been improving significantly for the past several years. For example, our chemical engineering program was ranked 65th in 2007 and 53rd in 2008 while our environmental engineering program 50th in 2008 and 39th in 2009.

I invite you to browse through our web to find more information about our department and the research of our faculty members. Please feel free to contact us for a campus visit, if you are in the Southern California area.

Yushan Yan, Department Chair