Houston Area Alumni and Friends Gathering

The University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering invites you and a guest to an informal gathering at Great Heights Brewing Company. Meet our new dean, Andrew Alleyne and mingle and network with fellow Gopher alumni and friends. You'll also have the opportunity to learn about "A Future in Sustainable Energy and Materials" from Professor Paul Dauenhauer—a 2020 recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship (a.k.a. "Genius Grant").

About the presentation

The challenge of the 21st century is developing sustainable technologies for new systems that supply and control energy and materials. Chemical engineers and materials scientists at the University of Minnesota are working collaboratively to develop entirely new processing architecture to address sustainability challenges. Efforts include:

• Plastics that biodegrade or can be collected and recycled at a competitive cost
• New chemicals that are manufactured from renewable resources and designed with novel characteristics that make them more effective, biodegradable, and flexible in their application
• New technologies to remove carbon from the air for long-term storage underground
• A new economic model of carbon-free energy that uses wind and solar energy as a fungible liquid fuel that can be stored, transported, and traded as a commodity
• Professor Dauenhauer will share more about these technologies—all of which are in development with a focus on efficient and cost-competitive processing.

Dean Alleyne

Andrew G. Alleyne became dean of the University of Minnesota College of Science and Engineering on Jan. 10, 2022. Prior to coming to the U of M, he was a faculty member in mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was the Ralph M. and Catherine V. Fisher Professor in Engineering and director of a multi-university research center sponsored by the National Science Foundation. He served in multiple academic leadership roles at all levels of the institution, including associate dean for research. He also led his department’s faculty recruiting committee, where he developed a multi-year plan that increased the hiring of women and underrepresented minority faculty.

Alleyne holds Ph.D. and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley as well as an undergraduate degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University. He has published and presented widely and throughout his career has received many awards and recognitions for his scholarship. He holds distinguished recognition as a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Among many collaborations with industry, academic, and government partners, he served for eight years on the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, most recently as the science and technology chair.

Professor Dauenhauer

Paul Dauenhauer received a bachelor of science in chemical engineering and chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2008. From 2008 to 2009, Paul worked as a senior research engineer for the Dow Chemical Company before joining the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2009. As of 2014, he is the Lanny & Charlotte Schmidt Professor and MacArthur Fellow at the University of Minnesota in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. His work has been highlighted with the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Department of Energy Early Career Award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and the AIChE CRE Young Investigator award. In 2020, he was selected as a MacArthur fellow. His published patent applications serve as the scientific foundation of five startup companies including Sironix Renewables, Lakril Technologies, Carba, Activated Research Company, and enVerde, LLC.