RISE Initiative brings three new faculty to CBE

We are excited to announce three new hires for Fall 2025, Jeffrey Greeley, Joel Paulson and Rahul Sujanani, as part of the Wisconsin Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence (RISE) Initiative. The RISE Initiative is an ambitious, campus-wide effort that aims to address pressing challenges through accelerated and strategic faculty hiring, research infrastructure enhancement, interdisciplinary collaboration, and increased educational opportunities.

Professor Greeley and Paulson are part of RISE-AI which focuses on both the core technical dimensions as well as the human-centered implications of AI. On core technical dimensions, RISE-AI will advance deep learning and foundation models, natural language processing, signal processing, learning theory, optimization, and related areas. On human-centered implications, RISE-AI will ensure AI trustworthiness, mitigate biases, preserve privacy, enhance fairness, and help establish AI policy and legal frameworks. RISE-AI will facilitate AI applications to multiple traditional disciplines and promote multidisciplinary collaborations.

Sujanani is a hire for RISE-EARTH which focuses around two themes. The first is to reimagine economic and environmental systems to, for example, find innovative ways to revitalize communities with new modes of transportation or renew agricultural lands to reduce erosion and enhance biodiversity. The other will be aimed at building sustainable energy and technical systems — for instance, developing new clean energy technologies and ways to capture and store carbon.

Jeffrey Greeley

Jeffrey Greeley will be joining the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering as the Paul A. Elfers Professor in the fall of 2025.

Prior to joining the department, Professor Greeley was at Purdue University’s Davidson School of Chemical Engineering where he was a professor since 2013. He obtained his PhD from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2004. Following two years of postdoctoral work at the Technical University of Denmark, he moved to Argonne National Laboratory, where he served for six years as a staff scientist in the Center for Nanoscale Materials before joining Purdue. He has published over 200 research articles and is considered one of the top professionals in computational catalysis both nationally and internationally.

Joel Paulson

This coming fall, Joel Paulson will join the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering as the Gerald and Louise Battist Associate Professor.

Professor Paulson comes from The Ohio State University’s William G. Lowrie Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, which he joined in 2019. He completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Chemical Engineering, followed by a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California, Berkeley, in systems and control theory. He has received several awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the AIChE 35 Under 35 Award, the Best Application Paper Prize from the 2020 IFAC World Congress, the OSU Lumley Research Award, and the David C. McCarthy Engineering Teaching Award.

Rahul Sujanani

Rahul Sujanani will join the department as an Assistant Professor where his work will broadly focus on polymeric materials and membrane-based separations. He completed his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2016 and received his PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022. During his PhD, his work focused on characterizing and modeling ion and water transport in membranes for water treatment. He completed his postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied ion transport in polymer electrolytes used in energy storage applications. His research interests center on understanding mass transport and thermodynamics across polymer-solution interfaces in order to design next-generation membranes for emerging water, energy, and environmental separations.