Chemical and Biological Engineering

In memory of our colleague, Princeton University’s Department of Chemical Engineering has established the Dudley A. Saville Lectureship for exceptional early-career chemical engineers and scientists. Inspired by his family and colleagues, this series reflects Dudley Saville’s longtime association with Princeton, his uncompromising pursuit of excellence, and his commitment to helping young people begin their academic careers. In his nearly 40 years at Princeton University, he pioneered new directions in fluid mechanics, especially electrohydrodynamics. Although Dudley’s emphasis was always on fundamentals, the practical applications of his research spanned protein crystallization, electrohydrodynamic printing, enhanced oil recovery, patterning of colloidal crystals, and fluid behavior in microgravity, including an experiment flown on the Space Shuttle Columbia.

Dudley was also a pillar supporting the department’s educational mission. Whether teaching thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, engineering mathematics, or transport phenomena, his classes were distinguished by their mathematical rigor and clarity of exposition. A demanding instructor, he earned the respect of generations of chemical engineering students.

In 1997, he received the Alpha Chi Sigma Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers; in 2001, he was named the Stephen C. Macaleer ’63 Professor in Engineering and Applied Science; and in 2003 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition for an American engineer.

Hang Lu is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering. She has a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering Practice from MIT (2000). She obtained her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering in 2003 from MIT working with Dr. Klavs F. Jensen (Chemical Engineering) and Dr. Martin A. Schmidt (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) on microfabricated devices for cellular and subcellular analysis for the study of programmed cell death. Between 2003 and 2005, she pursued a postdoctoral fellowship with neurogeneticist Dr. Cornelia I. Bargmann at University of California, San Francisco and later at the Rockefeller University on the neural basis of behavior in the nematode C. elegans. Her current research interests include microfluidics, automation, quantitative imaging, machine vision, and their applications in neurobiology, cell biology, and biotechnology. Her honors and awards include a National Science Foundation CAREER award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, a DuPont Young Professor Award, a DARPA Young Faculty Award, and a Georgia Tech Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award; she was also named an MIT Technology Review TR35 top innovator, and invited to give the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Van Ness Award Lectures in 2011.