Two students win awards at the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting

This fall, two chemical and biological engineering seniors were honored at the 2025 AIChE Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. The whole department is incredibly proud of them and look forward to seeing them graduate soon!

Morris Yen wins first place for his justification on mixing electrochemical devices

Electrochemical devices, such as electrolysis units, can play a critical role in providing flexibility to the power grid. However, there exists an inherent and poorly understood trade-off between device flexibility and durability, which hinders the participation of electrochemical devices in power grid markets and operations.

To overcome these challenges, senior Morris Yen proposes to mix parallel electrochemical devices that operate using structured protocols of limited flexibility. In his research project, he provides the mathematical justification for why mixing devices with structured protocols can help harness flexibility. Specifically, he shows that structured protocols can be seen as basis functions that, when mixed, enable the recovery of demand signals of any form. These results pave the way to a new perspective on how to think about the design and operation of electrochemical devices.

For his project Recovering Grid Flexibility By Mixing Structured Protocols across Parallel Electrochemical Devices, Yen won overall first place in the Undergraduate Student Poster Competition in Computing, Simulation and Process Control.

His research work began in January 2023, Yen developed an innovative electrochemical approach for ammonium recovery and biomass upgrading as part of Professor Song Jin’s group in the Department of Chemistry. From this, he collaborated with other groups on related projects and became very excited about Baldovin-DaPra Professor Victor Zavala‘s research. Eventually, he decided to learn more about developing optimization models to tackle various real-world challenges.

“Professor Zavala and my graduate mentor, Jukbin, gave me the opportunity to view electrochemical processes from a new and more insightful perspective,” says Yen.

Jacob Damro wins third place for his analysis of brain cancer metastasis

Brain cancer metastasis is a global health challenge that is associated with rising incidence rates and a median survival time of 6 months. Despite its severity, the mechanisms that govern brain cancer metastasis are poorly understood. It remains unclear how circulating tumor cells can extravasate across brain microvasculature to infiltrate brain tissue. Additionally, the ability to study tumor cell extravasation into brain tissue is currently limited by a lack of reproducible and physiologically relevant experimental models for brain cancer metastasis.

As part of the lab of Richard H. Soit Assistant Professor Mai Ngo, senior Jacob Damro developed, characterized, and validated a tissue-on-chip (ToC) model of brain microvasculature to study tumor cell extravasation into brain tissue. This model has the potential to study the biological processes that govern extravasation and aid in the identification of therapeutic targets to treat or prevent brain metastasis.

For this project titled Analysis of Brain Cancer Metastasis with Microfluidic Models, Damro won 3rd place in the Food, Pharma and Biotech V Student Poster Competition. This award is only his latest during his undergraduate career. He also won the 2025-2026 Wisconsin Hilldale Undergraduate/Faculty Research Fellowship in Spring 2025.

Damro’s experience in research has completely changed his perspective about chemical engineering and it’s potential applications. He plans to continue with research in biotechnology through a PhD in chemical engineering and eventually find a research job in industry. To others considering getting involved in undergraduate research, AIChE or any extracurriculars outside of normal course work, Damro urges students to go for it, saying “you won’t regret it.”