CBE:5000:0001, Fall 2026

Instructors: Prof. Alec Scranton and Prof. Joe Gomes

Location: 3505 Seamans Center

Time: 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Thursdays unless otherwise communicated.

DateSeminar
Aug 27No seminar
Sept 3Alec Scranton, Professor, Director of Graduate Studies, Interim Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University of Iowa
Jun Wang, Professor, Departmental Executive Officer, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, University of Iowa
Topic: Welcome seminar
Friday
Sept 11
Cristopher Moore, Resident Faculty, Santa Fe Institute
Topic: Easy, hard, and impossible: phase transitions in computation
Time: 3:30 – 4:30 p.m.
Location: 140 Schaeffer Hall
Sept 17James Ankrum, Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Hanson Center for Communication, University of Iowa
Topic: To be announced
Sept 24Marina Zhang, Engineering and Informatics Librarian
Topic: AI and literature discovery
Oct 1Adam Bourassa, Professor of Engineering Physics, University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Topic: The Aerosol Limb Imager: multi-spectral polarimetry for the stratosphere
Oct 8CBE Three-Minute Thesis Competition
Oct 15Chang Geun Yoo, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Topic: To be announced
Oct 22Rebecca Walters, PhD Candidate, University of Iowa
Topic: Investigating structure and molecular conformation in post-shock energy localization zones of energetic materials
Oct 29To be announced
Nov 5To be announced
Nov 12To be announced
Nov 19To be announced
Nov 26No seminar — fall break
Dec 3To be announced
Dec 10To be announced

 

Attendance policy:
Students registered for CBE:5000 are expected to attend all of the seminars listed above, though it is understood that personal or professional obligations may cause a student to miss one seminar. Any absence beyond one seminar must be made up by reading a couple papers by the speaker the student missed, then writing a 2-3 page single-spaced, referenced report on the speaker’s research. Describe the purpose of the research, what the researchers were studying, what types of experiments were performed and what information and/or conclusions were drawn from the experiments. Also describe, in your opinion, the next steps that should be taken or the next experiments that should be conducted in this research project, explaining what new information this future research would provide. Students missing a seminar in order to attend a professional conference may write a 1-2 page single-spaced report on one or two of the best talks which they attended at the conference to make up the corresponding seminar absence. Contact the CBE:5000 instructors for any questions regarding course policies.