Zavala’s commitment to education leads to ‘Statistics for Chemical Engineers’ textbook 

After several years of hard work, Victor Zavala, the Baldovin-DaPra Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has published a new textbook with Cambridge University Press titled Statistics for Chemical Engineers.

Several years ago, Zavala kept hearing from recent alumni that they felt they lacked the tools—like data analysis, risk modeling, and machine learning—needed to tackle emerging issues in their industries.

That’s why Zavala began developing a new statistics class for chemical engineers, tailored to the way chemical engineers think and the types of statistical problems they may encounter. That course, CBE 355, is now part of the chemical engineering curriculum.

The new textbook, which started with Zavala’s course notes and evolved with the input and aid of his CBE colleagues, students, and others, is the next step in that journey. The book makes the core concepts and materials from that chemical engineering statistics course available to educators around the globe. The textbook comes at just the right time, as data science, machine learning and handling uncertainty become more and more salient to chemical engineering and other fields.