Graduate Program

Graduate Degree Programs

Doctor of Philosophy in Chemical Engineering. In our PhD program, students develop into innovative problem solvers, working closely with a faculty member to advance human knowledge through an original research project. Read more about the research interests of our faculty on the Research page.

Professional Master's in Chemical Engineering. The next step for a rising professional, our Professional Master's program jumpstarts careers with industry-focused project-based learning in the concentrations of Bioengineering or Advanced Process Engineering. This unique degree program partners students with industry as part of a Graduate Qualifying Project (GQP). In this way, students gain experience by solving real problems and interacting with potential future employers.

Master's in Chemical Engineering. This degree program offers both thesis and non-thesis options, permitting individualized training in the Chemical Engineering discipline beyond the undergraduate level. Students with a chemistry background, but no chemical engineering background, are also encouraged to apply.

A Continuing Tradition of Innovation

WPI’s Chemical Engineering Department has a rich history of innovative research in the areas of membrane science, materials science, catalysis and reaction engineering. During the past decade we have hired new faculty and expanded our efforts to become a leader in the fields of bioengineering and energy.

Research Environment

Faculty research groups typically consist of a combination of postdocs, doctoral students, masters students, and undergraduate students, enabling diverse, dynamic teams of students to solve complex problems at the interfaces of engineering and science. WPI’s emphases on project based learning, interdisciplinary approaches, international perspectives and industrial relevance enable students to thrive in a contemporary research environment and to obtain a distinctive research preparation for careers in industry, academia, and government.

WPI Graduate Student Behnam Partopour wins award at the 2017 AIChE National Meeting

Behnam Partopour won the Area 20 poster session with his poster entitled "An integrated workflow for numerical generation and meshing of packed beds of non-spherical particles: Applications in chemical reaction engineering." Congratulations Behnam!

His abbreviated abstract:

Packed beds of different particle shapes are widely used in different areas of the chemical industry. Therefore, numerical generation of these beds is highly desired. In this work we introduce the automated packed bed generator (PBG) package for spherical and non-spherical particles based on the Bullet physics library. The bed properties for packed beds of different particle shapes are validated against existing experimental and computational data in the literature. Finally, for the first time the generated geometries are successfully used for resolved particle fixed-bed CFD simulations.