Sibani Lisa Biswal has been named to endowed chair, effective July 1.
Biswal, presently professor and associate chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering (ChBE), will become the William M. McCardell Professor in Chemical Engineering.
Biswal, who leads the Soft Matter Engineering Laboratory, joined the Rice faculty in 2006. She earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Stanford in 2004. She received an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2008 and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2009.
Her research focuses on using chemical, biological and engineering approaches to study soft materials such as colloids, polymers, lipids and surfactants. One of her principal concerns has been developing new materials using magnetic colloidal particles and characterizing multiphase flows in microfluidic systems.
She has received a Rice University Graduate Student Association Faculty Teaching and Mentoring Award (2012), the George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching (2015), the Rice University Chemical Engineering Alumni Professional Progress Award (2017) and the Southwest Texas Section AICHE Best Applied Paper Award (2018). She is an ELATE (Executive Leadership in Academic Technology and Engineering) Fellow for 2019-20.