News: CBE

We recently received sad news of the passing of Miriam Ackley, a friend and former instructor of the Smith School. Miriam was introduced to the department in 1998 when she retired from teaching high school mathematics and accompanied her husband, Ken Ackley (CBE’s first Industrial Practitioner) to campus. Miriam was interested in volunteering and her initial involvement in the AEW workshops grew into work that became an integral part of our department. Her years of experience in the school system proved to be useful in preparing our undergraduate students for teaching in a course she led... Read more

Professor Susan Daniel has been named the next director of the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, effective July 1, 2021. Read more

The College of Engineering hosted a first-of-its-kind virtual gathering on March 4 to welcome recently admitted engineering doctoral students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the field. Read more

ChemE Car Team wins AICHE Northeast Regional competition with two nearly perfect runs! The ChemE Car Competition is a biannual design challenge in which engineering students must design a small car, powered by a novel power source, that is stopped by a separate chemical reaction at a chosen distance from a start point. The car that can consistently get closest to this chosen distance wins! For the 2021 Northeast Regionals, Cornell opted to use "Fully Charged," an acrylic based design with a large motor and internal containment. The power source was a 10-cell, custom designed zinc alkaline... Read more

Cornell Professor Fengqi You has just released a study demonstrating that New York State’s pledge to reduce its total carbon pollution by 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 is “aggressive” yet “technologically and financially feasible.… as long as New York starts making changes now.” Read more

Another project, led by Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering, is using systems-level modeling and optimization to inform decisions on campus energy systems for carbon neutrality. You’s research team is particularly interested in assessing the challenges that arise from the fluctuations of energy demand, both by season and the daily cycle of electricity consumption, with Lake Source Cooling and Earth Source Heat. Read more

Cornell Engineering ranks #12 among engineering colleges in the 2022 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools rankings. Read more

You Group paper featured on March 2021 cover of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering A paper from the You Research Group titled "Sustainable Residential Micro-Cogeneration System Based on a Fuel Cell Using Dynamic Programming-Based Economic Day-Ahead Scheduling" (ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng., 2021, 9 (8), pp 3258–3266) DOI: 10.1021/acssuschemeng.0c08725., was selected to feature on the cover of March 2021 issue of ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. Read more

This work investigates the activation requirements for SARS-CoV-2 host-cell entry. SARS-CoV-2 entry is mediated by its spike (S) protein, and previous studies indicate that it has a novel S1/S2 site not before seen in SARS-like CoV that can be cleaved by furin-like proteases. Here, we show that S1/S2 cleavage expands SARS-CoV-2 entry into Calu-3 cells, a model lung cell line, but reduces SARS-CoV-2 entry into Vero E6, a model cell culture line. This S1/S2 cleavage was observed to be cleaved by proteases beyond furin and as a result of weak furin specificity, we offer thoughts on how it... Read more

The project is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Porotto and Moscona labs at Columbia and the Alabi lab at Cornell, which was launched in 2015. The collaboration paired the Columbia group’s virology research with Alabi’s work in engineering multifunctional macromolecules, with the initial goal of targeting the flu virus. Read more