At its heart, education is a process: Students move step by step through their curriculum and, if all goes well, this results in an end product: Graduates equipped to thrive in the real world.
That’s why University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers decided to apply their process systems engineering techniques to the chemical engineering undergraduate curriculum. Published in the journal Computers and Chemical Engineering in fall 2025, their work provides insights and new ways of thinking for educators in engineering—and in other disciplines—as they assess and update their curricula.
The effort began nearly a decade ago when Victor Zavala Tejeda, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison, wrote a proposal for a National Science Foundation-funded CAREER award. His research project explored modular chemical processes, or designing processes using standardized units that can be connected like LEGOs instead of designing each new process from scratch.
As part of that proposal, NSF also required him to develop an educational component.
“Digging a little bit into the research literature, I realized modularity is a principle that applies in almost everything you do, including education,” says Zavala. “If you think about it, a course that you take in undergrad is a module that has topics embedded in it. I thought we could use the same notions of network theory and modularity to try to think about how the topics in the curriculum are connected, and identify which ones make sense to group together and which one are most critical.”
Zavala tapped PhD student Blake Lopez to expand the idea. Lopez talked to instructors of all the core undergrad courses in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UW-Madison, developing an extensive database of topics covered in every course in the core curriculum. He also investigated how, in the minds of the instructors, the topics are interconnected to form a logical flow. Then, using algorithms, graph network theory and optimization tools, Lopez evaluated and built visualizations of the curriculum.
In their analysis, Zavala and Lopez found that the UW-Madison chemical engineering curriculum was very close to optimal in terms of how topics are arranged into courses. But the point wasn’t really to assess the existing curriculum. Instead, the project’s goal was to provide information on what topics are critical for students to master, as they connect with many other topics. This is information that can help instructors reinforce topics and communicate to students the relevance of such topics in later courses.
“We need to do a good job making sure students understand these key topics because they are going to be used for everything else,” says Zavala. “If they don’t master them, they are going to struggle moving forward.”
Lopez is now putting some of these ideas into practice as a teaching assistant professor at Lehigh University. Zavala is continuing the research in his lab and is simplifying some of the visualizations from the project to make its conclusions more user friendly. He’s also putting the research into action, helping his department map out and visualize its undergraduate pathway as the department undergoes its periodic curriculum review.
Zavala says these same optimization techniques can apply to other disciplines and educational processes. He hopes to develop tools for a broader set of users. “A network is a universal kind of abstraction, so you can apply it to chemical processes, energy systems or educational topics,” he says. “Once you start to see the world as networks, you just cannot stop seeing them.”
Victor Zavala is the Baldovin-DaPra Professor in chemical and biological engineering. Other UW-Madison authors include Yue Shao.
The authors acknowledge support from National Science Foundation CAREER award CBET-1748516.