ChE faculty receives the 2025 AIChE SEF Education Award

ChE faculty, Dr. Kirti Yenkie, is the recipient of the 2025 SEF Education Award from the Sustainable Engineering Forum (SEF) of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). The SEF Education Award recognizes Dr. Yenkie for her outstanding contributions to sustainability education.

Dr. Yenkie has over 15 years of experience in Process Systems Engineering with applications focusing on environment and sustainability. She leads the Sustainable Design and Systems Medicine Lab. Her teaching and mentoring efforts are geared towards educating students about environmental sustainability, including water treatment, solvent recycling, petroleum pipeline cleaning, plastics recycling, and machine learning for early-stage life cycle analysis (LCA). She has developed educational modules and videos for STEM outreach on sustainability with activities such as popcorn-making to demonstrate LCA, oil spill cleanup, and polymer coatings to demonstrate recyclability.

Dr. Yenkie has won awards that include the 2022 AIChE Environmental Division Early Career Award, the 2023 AIChE Delaware Valley Section Outstanding Faculty Award, and the 2024 NSF CAREER Award. She was honored in 2019 as one of 20 Outstanding Young Chemical Engineering Educators by the CACHE (Computer Aids for Chemical Engineering) organization.