Undergraduates in the Iowa State chemical engineering program will soon benefit from lab enhancements, thanks to a $183,000 grant award from the College of Engineering’s continuous improvement initiative for undergraduate education.
The team of University Professor Charles Glatz, Professor Emeritus Ken Jolls and Senior Lecturer Stephanie Loveland proposed and will carry out a successful grant proposal for $183,000 to improve undergraduate laboratories. The funds will be used for new and replicate equipment for experiments, modernizing of some existing experiments, and a part-time lab technician and undergraduate student workers to assemble and introduce the experiments to classes in fall 2012. A record enrollment trend in ChE 325, ChE 426 and ChE 427 courses, which use the labs, has inspired the need for such enhancements in Sweeney Hall.
“The unit operations laboratory is an historic rite of passage in the chemical engineering curriculum,” Jolls says. “The lab connects theory with practice, while potential graduate students use the lab to prepare for research.”
The grant is part of the collective $2.2 million distributed by Iowa State College of Engineering to engineering departments for continuous improvement in undergraduate education.