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Masters Program - Chemical Engineering

The Department of Chemical Engineering offers a thesis option in pursuing the Master of Engineering (M.E.) with concentration in Chemical Engineering degree. It does not offer a non-thesis option at this time.

Qualified students may apply for the Enders Fellowship to support their research.

To receive the M.E. degree, graduate students in chemical engineering must complete a minimum of 30 graduate-level credits beyond their baccalaureate degree.  6 of these credits must be for a thesis project on an approved topic (ChE499). It is recommended that students take ChE421 (Advanced Chemical Reaction Engineering), ChE/ME/EID440 (Advanced Fluid Mechanics), ChE/EID441 (Advanced Heat and Mass Transfer) and/or Ch460 (Statistical Mechanics and Computational Chemistry) if they are offered.

18 credits of the 30 must be from Chemical Engineering graduate courses, i.e. ones with course codes ChE4XX.  This includes the ChE499 requirement above.  The remaining 12 credits of the 30 may be from other graduate engineering or science electives (e.g. Ch4XX, EID4XX, Bio4XX, etc.)   All coursework must be approved by the student's thesis research advisor.

A thesis candidate must choose a full-time Cooper Union faculty member from either the chemistry or chemical engineering departments as one of their thesis research advisors by the end of their first semester. Thesis projects may be co-advised by up to two faculty members.  Before choosing a thesis topic, students should meet with each faculty member in the chemistry and chemical engineering departments to discuss potential projects and each professor’s research interests.

Research interests of chemical engineering faculty members include nature-inspired chemical engineering, polymeric biomaterials for medical applications, drug delivery, environmental engineering, evaluation of sustainability, life cycle assessment, batch process design and optimization, pollution prevention and mitigation, optimization (linear and non-linear programming), particle technology, multiphase flow and fluidization, pharmaceutical engineering and processes, identifying reaction mechanisms for energy applications, design of carbon dioxide adsorbents, and energy systems and processes.

For more detail on faculty research interests, please refer to their research webpages through their bios here.

Applicants to the M.E. program who did not receive their baccalaureate degree in chemical engineering are expected to have taken coursework in material and energy balances, thermodynamics, reaction engineering / advanced chemical kinetics OR transport phenomena, and computer programming / scientific computing.  Students lacking this coursework will be required to take undergraduate courses to complete the program.

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