Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a private research university in Troy, New York, with an additional campus in Hartford, Connecticut. A third campus in Groton, Connecticut, closed in 2018. RPI was established in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer and Amos Eaton for the "application of science to the common purposes of life" and is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere.
Biochemical engineering, also known as bioprocess engineering, is a field of study with roots stemming from chemical engineering and biological engineering. It mainly deals with the design, construction, and advancement of unit processes that involve biological organisms or organic molecules and has various applications in areas of interest such as biofuels, food, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and water treatment processes. The role of a biochemical engineer is to take findings developed by biologists and chemists in a laboratory and translate that to a large-scale manufacturing process.
Rahul Sarpeshkar is the Thomas E. Kurtz Professor and a professor of engineering, professor of physics, professor of microbiology & immunology, and professor of molecular and systems biology at Dartmouth. Sarpeshkar, whose interdisciplinary work is in bioengineering, electrical engineering, quantum physics, and biophysics, is the inaugural chair of the William H. Neukom cluster of computational science, which focuses on analog, quantum, and biological computation. The clusters, designed by faculty from across the institution to address major global challenges, are part of President Philip Hanlon's vision for strengthening academic excellence at Dartmouth. Prior to Dartmouth, Sarpeshkar was a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and led the Analog Circuits and Biological Systems Group. He is now also a visiting scientist at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.
Jay D. Keasling is a professor of chemical engineering and bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also associate laboratory director for biosciences at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and chief executive officer of the Joint BioEnergy Institute. He is considered one of the foremost authorities in synthetic biology, especially in the field of metabolic engineering.
Biological engineering or bioengineering is the application of principles of biology and the tools of engineering to create usable, tangible, economically viable products. Biological engineering employs knowledge and expertise from a number of pure and applied sciences, such as mass and heat transfer, kinetics, biocatalysts, biomechanics, bioinformatics, separation and purification processes, bioreactor design, surface science, fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and polymer science. It is used in the design of medical devices, diagnostic equipment, biocompatible materials, renewable energy, ecological engineering, agricultural engineering, process engineering and catalysis, and other areas that improve the living standards of societies.
The Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies is a research facility at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The 218,000-square-foot (20,300 m2) building is located on 15th street between RPI’s Playhouse and Academy Hall, next to the Center for Industrial Innovation. The institute hopes the new facility will help to encourage collaboration between experts in different fields, allowing them to solve problems that they would be unable to solve alone. As of 2008, the director of the center is Jonathan Dordick. The building cost $100M.
Bioprocess engineering, also biochemical engineering, is a specialization of chemical engineering or biological engineering. It deals with the design and development of equipment and processes for the manufacturing of products such as agriculture, food, feed, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, chemicals, and polymers and paper from biological materials & treatment of waste water. Bioprocess engineering is a conglomerate of mathematics, biology and industrial design, and consists of various spectrums like the design and study of bioreactors to the creation of kinetic models. It also deals with studying various biotechnological processes used in industries for large scale production of biological product for optimization of yield in the end product and the quality of end product. Bioprocess engineering may include the work of mechanical, electrical, and industrial engineers to apply principles of their disciplines to processes based on using living cells or sub component of such cells.
Daniel I-Chyau Wang was an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was known for founding the MIT Biotechnology Process Engineering Center and the expansion of the field of biochemical engineering.
Frances Hamilton Arnold is an American chemical engineer and Nobel Laureate. She is the Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering the use of directed evolution to engineer enzymes.
Robert J. Linhardt is the Ann and John Broadbent, Jr. '59 Senior Constellation Professor Biocatalysis & Metabolic Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
György Kéri was a Hungarian biochemist, professor and Doctor of Biological Sciences (D.Sc.). His major field of research was signal transduction therapy and he participated in the development of novel drug discovery technologies and drug candidates that entered the clinical development process.
Benjamin Guy Davis is Professor of Chemical biology in the Department of Pharmacology and a member of the Faculty in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. He holds the role of Science Director for Next Generation Chemistry (2019-2024) at the Rosalind Franklin Institute.
Wei-Shou Hu is a Taiwanese-American chemical engineer. He earned his B.S. in agricultural chemistry from National Taiwan University in 1974 and his Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Daniel I.C. Wang in 1983. He has been a professor with the University of Minnesota since 1983. Dr. Hu has long impacted the field of cell culture bioprocessing since its infancy by steadfastly introducing quantitative and systematic analysis into this field. His work, which covers areas such as modeling and controlling cell metabolism, modulating glycosylation, and process data mining, has helped shape the advances of biopharmaceutical process technology. He recently led an industrial consortium to embark on genomic research on Chinese hamster ovary cells, the main workhorse of biomanufacturing, and to promote post-genomic research in cell bioprocessing. His research focuses on the field of cell culture bioprocessing, particularly metabolic control of the physiological state of the cell. In addition to his work with Chinese hamster ovary cells, his work has enabled the use of process engineering for cell therapy, especially with liver cells. Dr.Hu has written four different biotechnology books. Also, one of his articles is cited by 63.
Alan J. Russell, is Vice President of Biologics for Amgen, one of the world’s leading Biopharmaceutical companies. Until 2020, Alan was the Highmark Distinguished Career Professor and Director of the Disruptive Health Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. From 2013 through spring of 2016 he was also the Chief Innovation Officer, Allegheny Health Network.
Nigel Shaun Scrutton is a British biochemist and biotechnology innovator known for his work on enzyme catalysis, biophysics and synthetic biology. He is Director of the UK Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, Director of the Fine and Speciality Chemicals Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SYNBIOCHEM), and Co-founder, Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the 'fuels-from-biology' company C3 Biotechnologies Ltd. He is Professor of Enzymology and Biophysical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He is former Director of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB).
Greg N. Stephanopoulos is an American chemical engineer and the Willard Henry Dow Professor in the department of chemical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has worked at MIT, Caltech, and the University of Minnesota in the areas of biotechnology, bioinformatics, and metabolic engineering especially in the areas of bioprocessing for biochemical and biofuel production. Stephanopoulos is the author of over 400 scientific publications with more than 35,000 citations as of April 2018. In addition, Greg has supervised more than 70 graduate students and 50 post-docs whose research has led to more than 50 patents. He was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2005), a member of the National Academy of Engineering (2003), and received the ENI Prize on Renewable Energy 2011.
Pierre Monsan is a French biochemist and entrepreneur. He is currently Professor emeritus at the Institut national des sciences appliquées de Toulouse and the founding director of the pre-industrial demonstrator Toulouse White Biotechnology (TWB).
Marco Wilhelmus Fraaije is a Dutch scientist whose research concerns enzymology of redox enzymes, enzyme discovery & engineering and biocatalysis at the Groningen Biomolecular Sciences and Biotechnology Institute (GBB) at the University of Groningen.
Jerome Schultz is an American bioengineering researcher, professor, and university administrator. He is a fellow of several national scientific societies and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has held professorships at the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, University of California, Riverside, and he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston.
David W. Wood is an American chemical engineer who is Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Ohio State University. Wood is also associated with the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics Training Program.
