Chair & Professor
Dear alumni, students, faculty and friends,
As the spring semester draws to a close, I’m pleased to share some of the department’s accomplishments in the latest issue of the newsletter.
First, I’d like to welcome our newest Chemical Engineering Advisory Board members — Engineering alumni Mark Pepple, Ph.D., from Sandia National Labs and Gretta Granado Huerta from Dow, Inc. See what these successful Gators have accomplished since graduation.
Three long-time professors are retiring this year: Professors Mark Orazem, Spyros Svoronos and Sergey Vasenkov. You can learn more about them and their UF legacies in this issue.
Professor Orazem, incidentally, will be honored later this year by the Electrochemical Society for his multidisciplinary research.
Nozka, a student of Professor Carlos Rinaldi-Ramos, earned a UF Health award for her novel approach to heat-based cancer imaging. Also in this issue, read about Professor Orazem’s former student, Eluagu, Ph.D., a fascinating graduate who discusses her UF experience and her workplace journey.
We share the successes of Associate Professor Piyush Jain, using CRISPR LEAP technology that can deliver cancer test results back in minutes.
If you’d like to know more about what Associate Professor Helena Hagelin-Weaver does every day, have a look at the article about her new and improved catalyst designs.
Associate Professor Jeongseon Jang and her graduate students received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation Biomaterials to further their work in modern immunotherapies.
And we also visit the lab of Professor Jason Weaver to find out how he and his students developed a new catalyst to create hydrogen gas.
Finally, I’d like to thank everyone who contributed on Giving Day. Your support helps our students and faculty, and we appreciate it.
ChE is off to a great start in 2026, and we’ll have more stories to share later in the year. In the meantime, please follow us on social media for regular updates.
Thanks for all you do and go Gators!
Sincerely,
Richard Dickinson, Ph.D.
Chair and Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering