Chemical and Biological Engineering

Thermodynamics and statistical mechanics have a long and distinguished research tradition at Princeton’s Chemical Engineering Department. The emphasis is on fundamental problems, and a wide range of techniques are employed, from state-of-the-art computer simulation algorithms to elegant "pencil-and-paper" approaches. The range of problems which are currently being investigated include self-assembly in soft condensed matter, criticality in ionic systems, theory of rate constants, multi-scale simulation of materials, application of quantum chemistry to the study of failure mechanisms of materials under extreme conditions, statistical characterization of structure in heterogeneous materials, optimal design of composites, application of global optimization to protein folding, theory of supercooled liquids and the glass transition, thermodynamics and dynamics of confined fluids, thermodynamics of protein stability, statistical mechanics of protein evolution, and nucleation theory.