Professors Lisa Bullard and Richard Felder are AIChE Fellows

Teaching Professor Lisa G. Bullard and Hoechst Celanese Professor Emeritus Richard M. Felder have been have been elected as Fellows of the AIChE.

The AIChE bylaws stipulate that Fellow is AIChE’s highest grade of membership and is bestowed in recognition of “service to the profession” and “significant professional accomplishment.”

Significant professional accomplishments are based on “success in process, product, or theoretical developments, project leadership, managerial achievement, the educating of engineers, or other activities related to chemical engineering.” The bylaws also stipulate that the number of Fellows at any time is limited to five percent of the total membership.

Professor Lisa Bullard
Professor Lisa Bullard

Professor Bullard considers her most important accomplishment to be the care and nurture of undergraduate chemical engineering students at NC State. In her role as the CBE Undergraduate Director and Teaching Professor, she has taught and/or advised more than 2600 chemical engineering graduates.

Unsurprisingly, her dedication to her students has won her a great deal of respect, admiration, and teaching and advising awards over the years. An insightful video visit with “Professor B” can be viewed here.

A CBE graduate (B.S. ’86), Prof. Bullard earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. She worked for Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport, TN for nine years. In 2000, she returned to NC State as the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the (then) Department of Chemical Engineering – a role she calls her “dream job.”

Professor Bullard is internationally recognized as a leader in the field of effective teaching that promotes student learning. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), has served as Chair of the ASEE Chemical Engineering Division and is an Associate Editor of the journal Chemical Engineering Education. Her national awards include the ASEE Southeast Section Mid-Career Teaching Award, the Wiley Premier Award for Engineering Education Courseware, the Maryellen Weimer Scholarly Work on Teaching and Learning Award (with other recipients), the Outstanding Faculty Award from the NC State Professional Women in the Workplace Symposium, and the Outstanding Young Engineer of Tennessee from the Tennessee Society of Professional Engineers,

Her NC State awards include the George H. Blessis Outstanding Undergraduate Advisor Award, the NCSU Faculty Advisor Award, and the Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award. She’s an NCSU Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor and a member of the Academy of Outstanding Teachers.

Professor Bullard’s research interests lie in the areas of teaching and advising effectiveness, academic integrity, and instruction in material and energy balances and capstone process design. The combination of her demonstrated excellence in teaching and range of real-world professional experiences prompted professors Richard Felder and Ron Rousseau to invite her to be a co-author of the CHE 205 textbook, the 4th edition of Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes, which is used by 90% of chemical engineering students worldwide.

Professor Bullard’s connections to NC State don’t end at the end of her work day. In 2013, the NC State Alumni Association selected Prof. Bullard and her family — husband Michael and daughter Meredith, both NCSU civil engineering graduates — as the Wolfpack Family of the Year. During fall weekends, the family members are avid Wolfpack supporters at Carter-Finley Stadium.

Professor Richard Felder
Professor Richard Felder

Professor Felder received a B.Ch.E. degree from the City College of New York in 1962 and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Princeton University in 1966. He spent a year as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell, England) and then two years as a research engineer at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

He joined the (then) Department of Chemical Engineering faculty in 1969. For roughly the first half of his career, Prof. carried out research on a variety of topics, starting with his doctoral and postdoctoral research on energy distributions of energetic atoms in irradiated media, progressing through mathematical modeling of mixing and diffusion in chemical reactors, fluidized bed gasification of coal, and diffusion of gases and vapors in polymer membranes, and concluding with stochastic modeling of specialty chemicals manufacturing processes. He has authored or co-authored over 300 papers on chemical process engineering and engineering and science education.

In 1978, Profs. Felder and Ronald W. Rousseau co-authored Elementary Principles of Chemical Processes. Now in its fourth edition (co-authored with Prof. Lisa Bullard), the textbook became the standard textbook for the introductory chemical engineering course in the United States. It has been adopted by more than 90% of all U.S. chemical engineering departments and at many institutions in other countries, and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean.

Professor Felder has won numerous awards for his teaching, research, and publications, including the AIChE Warren K. Lewis Award for Contributions to Chemical Engineering Education, the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies Global Award for Excellence in Engineering Education (first recipient), and the ASEE Education Lifetime Achievement Award (first recipient).

Beginning in the late 1980s, Felder shifted his career focus from disciplinary engineering research to education, including educational research. With his wife, Dr. Rebecca Brent, he coauthored Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide, a guidebook for instructors of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, and he has authored or co-authored three education-related book chapters and over 120 education related articles and over 100 “Random Thoughts” columns in the quarterly journal Chemical Engineering Education.

Felder and Dr. Brent have given over 300 education-related seminars and over 300 teaching workshops on campuses throughout the United States and abroad. He is the co-founder (with James Stice) of the National Effective Teaching Institute sponsored by the ASEE, and co-directed it from 1991 through 2015. In 2019, Prof. Felder and Dr. Brent received honorary doctorate degrees from Concordia University.

Congratulations to Professors Bullard and Felder for this prestigious recognition of your outstanding career accomplishments!