Eric Furst: College of Engineering
 Outstanding Junior Faculty Member

Eric Furst, who joined the faculty in the UD Department of Chemical Engineering in 2001, was named Outstanding Junior Faculty Member for 2007.  He was recently granted tenure and has been promoted to Associate Professor as of September 1.

Furst started his career supported by a DuPont Young Professor Grant.  Since then, he has been very successful in attracting external funding, and he now supports a research group that includes twelve graduate students and two postdocs.  He has also worked with a number of undergraduates over the past several years, and he credits them with helping him to launch his research programs here six years ago.

A CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation three years ago laid the groundwork for a current collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories on energetic nanomaterials.  Furst also has support from NASA to conduct microgravity experiments on field-responsive structured fluids.

In addition, he is co-investigator on an NSF Nanoscale Interdisciplinary Research Team (NIRT) grant.  Led by Prof. Norm Wagner, the NIRT funds support work on nanoscale-directed self-assembly in electrical and optical fields.  The team also includes Dean Eric Kaler as well as faculty from North Carolina State University and the California Institute of Technology.

As his research program grows, Furst is developing meaningful collaborations with international organizations and industry.  “Companies like DuPont and Proctor & Gamble are picking up on our innovations,” he says.

Furst is also strongly committed to the professional societies associated with his areas of expertise.  With Wagner and Kaler, he was co-organizer of the 81st ACS Colloid & Surface Science Symposium, held at the University of Delaware from June 24-27, 2007.  Some 550 attendees participated in the symposium.

For Furst, there was some nostalgia involved in that event.  “The first professional meeting I attended as a grad student was the same symposium in 1997, which was hosted by the University of Delaware that year as well.  It was very rewarding to be a co-chair ten years later,” he says.

by Diane Kukich