Robert H. Davis
Dean and Tisone Chair

Robert H. Davis is the Tisone Chair in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering and dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He received his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1978, and his master's and Ph.D. degrees in chemical engineering from Stanford University in 1979 and 1982, respectively. He spent a year at the University of Cambridge as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics before joining the faculty at the University of Colorado in 1983.

Dean Davis served as chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1992 to 2002, before his appointment as dean of the college. He also served as the director of the Colorado RNA Center and co-director of the Colorado Institute for Research in Biotechnology from 1987 to 2001. In 1989, he founded the Interdisciplinary Biotechnology Graduate Training Program at the University of Colorado.

His research and teaching interests are in biotechnology, complex fluids, and membrane separations, and he has more than 160 reviewed publications in these fields, plus six publications on teaching and mentoring. His recent work has included drop breakup and coalescence, simulations of emulsion flows, microfluidics, the behavior of suspended particles with microscopic surface roughness, fouling reduction in crossflow microfiltration by membrane surface modification and rapid backpulsing, and enzymatic transcription of ribonucleic acids using templates immobilized on suspended particles. He has supervised more than 50 graduate students, 10 postdoctoral associates, and 120 undergraduate students on related research projects. While on the faculty at the University of Colorado, he also has raised more than $18 million in external funds to support research and educational initiatives.

Dean Davis has been recognized with a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, an American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Outstanding Young Faculty Award, the ASEE Dow Lectureship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He also won all three top faculty awards (Outstanding Research, Teaching, and Service) from the College of Engineering and Applied Science before being appointed dean.

His professional activities have included organizing the IUTAM Symposium on Hydrodynamic Diffusion of Suspended Particles in 1995, the technical program of the AIChE Annual Meeting in 1999, and the technical program of the North American Membrane Society Annual Meeting in 2000. He co-organized a series of workshops on Teaching Fluid-Particle Processes for the 1997 ASEE Summer School for Chemical Engineering Faculty, and he served as guest editor of a special feature section of Chemical Engineering Education in 1998, which contained seven articles related to the recommendations of this workshop. He was co-chair of the 2002 ASEE Summer School for Chemical Engineering Faculty held at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Complete vita