Three CBE graduate students — Nick Caggiano, Drew Carson and Madeleine Chalifoux — have been awarded the inaugural Jui Dasgupta Outstanding AI Award, recognizing their contributions to the department's undergraduate teaching initiatives.

The Jui Dasgupta Outstanding AI Award was established in 2020 to honor notable assistants in instruction (AI) as determined by undergraduate feedback. The award was made possible through a generous endowment from Sanjay Dasgupta, who received his Ph.D. from the department in 1997. His Ph.D. was co-advised by Roy Jackson and Sankaran Sundaresan.

Named in honor of Dasgupta’s mother, the award will be given each semester to a graduate student AI who has excelled in assisting the teaching of a CBE course.

In addition to the Jui Dasgupta award, the new endowment will provide other future opportunities to recognize and support graduate student achievements.

Nick Caggiano was the award’s recipient in the fall of 2020 for his assistantship in the course "Design, Synthesis, and Optimization of Chemical Processes" (CBE 442). Taught by C. Morris Smith and Athanassios Z. Panagiotopoulos, the course led students to design the general and specific diagrams that help integrate the components of a chemical plant.

Drew Carson and Madeleine Chalifoux were awarded for the spring 2021 term. Both assisted Stanislav Y. Shvartsman in teaching "Chemical Reaction Engineering" (CBE 441). The course introduces undergraduates to designing and operating chemical reactors, which alter substances at the atomic level.