Daniel Lepek ChE'04, professor of chemical engineering, passed away on May 26. A deeply beloved professor and colleague since 2009, Dan shared his many talents with his family, his musical colleagues, and The Cooper Union, which according to his brother, Matt Lepek, was the place he loved most.

A favorite of students in the Chemical Engineering Department, Dan developed new elective courses such as Particle Technology, Pharmaceutical Engineering, and Applied Food Science and Engineering. He also has made significant revisions to the Chemical Engineering Laboratory and Transport-related course sequences. In 2015, he received the Ray W. Fahien Award from the Chemical Engineering Division of the American Society of Engineering Education for his teaching excellence and contributions to engineering pedagogy. Four years earlier he earned an Engineering Education Mentoring Grant from the same division to develop innovations in engineering education and pedagogy.

For Dan, teaching was a deeply creative endeavor and sprang from his exceptional curiosity and love of learning. (His brother remembers him reading encyclopedias before bed as a child.) Last year, he staged an informal reading of an Ibsen play as part of a professional development course, calling the reading An Enemy of the People — An Immersive Theatrical Experience on Engineering Ethics. 

Dan served as Chair of the Education Division of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), a role he saw as a long-term commitment in order to have a meaningful impact on chemical engineering education and increase diversity in the field. (In an interview at In the (Fume) Hood, Dan talks about his approach to teaching, his hopes for the Education Division, and his musical and food tastes.) He was also a co-author of the 5th Edition of the textbook, Transport Processes and Separation Process Principles (Pearson/Prentice-Hall).

Awarded a Fulbright to teach in Graz, Austria in 2016, he then served as Cooper’s advisor to students applying for their own Fulbright awards. In 2015, he was invited to be a visiting lecturer of chemical engineering at University College London.

On top of his substantial research, teaching, and writing, Dan teamed up with Professor Brian Cusack ME'01 M.Eng'03 to lead the accreditation process in 2018. The job was challenging, but the two, who had already bonded over beers at the Blind Tiger Ale House, knew they could count on each other during the arduous process. “I’ve never worked so hard or so effective academically, and I believe we pushed each other to be better than we individually were. I know he brought out narrative from me I didn’t know I had.  It was a perfect partnership and I’ll never forget it.”

Good Food, Better Music

Born in Staten Island, Daniel Howard Lepek attended Tottenville High School before studying chemical engineering at The Cooper Union. He went on to earn his doctorate in 2009 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) with a dissertation entitled “Enhanced Fluidization of Nanoparticle Agglomerates.” At NJIT, he received a National Science Foundation IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) Fellowship in Nano-Pharmaceutical Engineering and an IREE (International Research and Education in Engineering) award.

But long before he arrived at Cooper Square or trained as a chemical engineering professor, he’d fallen deeply and permanently in love with music, training as a classical pianist from the age of 7. He and his brother attended the Manhattan School of Music’s pre-college program and spent their summers at French Woods Festival for the Arts in the Catskills. There, Dan served as the camp’s music director beginning when he was 14 years old. French Woods remained a beloved location for Dan, a place where he met lifelong friends and collaborators. While working on his senior project at Cooper, he acted as conductor and substitute pianist for an off-Broadway show. He went on to play in hundreds of musicals over the course of his lifetime and though thoroughly conversant with classical music was equally engaged with musical theater. In an informative and hilarious review of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2014 staging of Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor, Dan’s wide-ranging knowledge of popular and classical music is on full display, along with a revelation of his fondness for Borodin, himself a composer and chemistry professor.

In a recent Facebook post, his brother, Matt Lepek, a professional woodwind musician, recalled his older brother’s genius and generosity. For instance, when he was auditioning for music schools, Daniel volunteered to play piano accompaniment to the Glazunov Saxophone Concerto. Matt said that “the professors in the room basically forgot that I was the one auditioning and focused mostly on Dan’s amazing playing.”

Dan shared his musical talents at Cooper as well: he regularly accompanied performers at the student talent show, and as President Laura Sparks recently recalled, loved playing the Steinway grand piano at the Stuyvesant Fish House. Colleagues report he attended shows regularly, usually pairing the outing with another great passion—great cuisine.

“When I first arrived at Cooper Union in the spring semester of 2019, Daniel was the first faculty member to invite me to lunch where he introduced me to Madame Vo’s Vietnamese restaurant,” said Dean Barry Shoop. “It continues to be one of my favorites in the East Village and it will evoke special memories of Daniel in the future.”

Known as a methodical, thorough researcher—he once claimed to be suffering from “lamp fatigue” after a four-month search for the perfect lighting fixture—Dan investigated restaurants and breweries with the same commitment he brought to chemical engineering. He wanted to sample local delicacies wherever he went, even fried bologna on an accreditation visit in the Midwest, and loved attending haute cuisine meals at restaurants like the French Laundry. At times, the gastronomic and the academic intersected like his visits to the Finback Brewery in Ridgewood, Queens to talk to the distiller about the chemical process while sampling new gin cocktails.

A close friend of the Lepek brothers described Dan in a way that seemed to Matt to sum up his older brother perfectly: “One of the many things I always adored about Dan,” the friend wrote, “is that if you weren’t paying close attention, or it wasn’t made obvious, you would never know that you were in the presence of a true, multifaceted genius! Just a great, regular guy, who happened to be exceedingly brilliant.”