Bayer Foundation Grant Creates Graduate Engineering Fellowship At University Of Houston

Pittsburgh, PA - The Bayer Foundation announced recently it has awarded a $90,000 grant to the University of Houston's Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (UH CHBE) to establish the Bayer Graduate Fellowship Program.

The fellowship, which is competitive with other prestigious fellowships from the National Science Foundation and elsewhere, will be awarded over a three-year period to a graduate student pursuing a doctoral degree in chemical engineering. The recipient will be identified from a pool of second year students seeking to complete his/her studies.

"We are extremely pleased to make this gift to the University of Houston, an institution whose chemical and biomolecular engineering department is consistently placed among the top echelon in the United States for the quality of its faculty, their scholarship and research projects, as well as the quality and number of Ph.D. engineering students it graduates each year," said Willy Scherf, President and CEO, Bayer Corporate and Business Services LLC.

According to UH's CHBE, the department graduates nearly one Ph.D. student per year per faculty member. Presently, there are 14 full-time faculty members in the department.

"As a leading producer of polymers and high-performance plastics, we at Bayer MaterialScience are also impressed with the department's particular strengths in the areas of chemical reaction engineering, process engineering and control, and mathematical modeling," said Gregory S. Babe, President and CEO, Bayer MaterialScience LLC. "We are very aware of the fact that the growth of biotechnology and materials, including polymeric and bio- or plant-based materials, is producing a new group of graduates highly skilled in specialty products spanning polymers and biomaterials and that many of these graduates are coming out the University of Houston CHBE program."

Both Bayer MaterialScience and Bayer Corporate and Business Services (BCBS) share a facility in Baytown, Texas.

"We are extremely grateful to the Bayer Foundation for this grant," said Mike Harold, chairman of the CHBE Department. "The University of Houston Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is committed to producing doctoral students who have been educated in the fundamentals of our field and who have used that knowledge to carry out pioneering research. By establishing this fellowship, Bayer is helping us further this commitment."

SOURCE: The Bayer Foundation