Human-Centered Engineering undergrads are among AIChE competition winners
Boston College students in the Human-Centered Engineering program won awards at the highly competitive Undergraduate Poster Competition of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) annual meeting.
Overall, 14 students and faculty members from BC’s Engineering research groups participated in the event held in Boston last month, including nine undergraduate posters, two faculty/postdoc posters, one undergraduate oral presentation, two faculty oral presentations, and one faculty-chaired session. AIChE is the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, with more than 60,000 members from more than 110 countries.
Boston College faculty and student participants at the AIChE annual meeting included (l-r): Melanie Cotta, Research Assistant Professor Antonio Freitas dos Santos, Charlotte Tonelli, Claire Richter, William Rice, Luke Baxter, Assistant Professor Emma Brace, Gillian Mohr, Isabella Doyle, Sarvada Chipkar, Ryan Cunningham, and Assistant Professor Ali Salifu.
With over 550 posters entered in the undergraduate research division, William Rice ’26 captured second place in the Computing & Process Control section; Melanie Cotta ’26 earned third place in the Education & General Papers category; and Carlos Pelayo ’26 finished third in the Environmental sector.
Rice and Cotta are undergraduate research fellows in the Brace Lab, led by Assistant Professor Emma Brace, while Pelayo is an assistant in Assistant Professor Ali Salifu’s lab.
“I’m extremely proud of Mel, Will, and all of the other BC students who are co-authors on these projects,” said Brace, who added that the competition results were an “amazing recognition of the work we have been doing as a team on sustainable production of xylitol,” a natural sugar alcohol found in plants regarded as an excellent alternative to sugar in products like gum, candies, and toothpaste.
Rice, whose poster was titled “Process Design and Techno-Economic Analysis of Sustainable Xylitol Production Using BioSTEAM,” presents the team’s effort to “scale up” the fabrication completed in the laboratory and modeled how the process might function at an industrial level.
“The goal was to evaluate the economic feasibility of a newly developed biological production pathway for xylitol, an important platform chemical that is currently produced using costly and energy-intensive methods,” he said.
Pelayo said the positive response to his poster, “Ceramic Water Filters for the Removal of Bacteria and Heavy Metals from Contaminated Water,” and recognition for his team’s work had encouraged him “to further develop ceramic water filters to help people in need, a motive emphasized throughout my four years in the Human-Centered Engineering program.”
Praising Pelayo, Salifu noted that this work is the culmination of the considerable efforts by his lab to develop low-cost water filters for household purification. He also cited the contributions of Thomas Gregory ’26, Research Fellow Thomas Buckman, and Robert Snee, senior scientific instrumentation machinist in BC’s Scientific Instrumentation & Machining Services department.
“We now have a proven recipe to start a community-led water filter production using locally sourced materials aimed at improving access to safe drinking water in resource-limited settings.”