CMU Welcomes New Head of Chemical Engineering

Internationally renowned researcher Anne Skaja Robinson has joined Carnegie Mellon University as head of its Department of Chemical Engineering. Robinson comes from Tulane University, where she was chair of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering since 2012. She succeeds Lorenz Biegler, who served as the department head for five years. Robinson's lab has two main goals: to understand the disease mechanisms behind neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and to improve the production of biopharmaceuticals on an industrial scale. When it comes to pharmaceuticals, half of today's top selling biopharmaceutical drugs are antibody drugs, like Humira, used in immunotherapy to stimulate a patient's immune system to attack invasive cells. However, industry faces challenges in producing these biopharmaceuticals which, are made by cells (rather than small molecules like aspirin). Many finished batches of biopharmaceuticals are thrown out, at a very high cost, due to complications that ruin the batch somewhere along the process, but can't be detected until the final failed drug is produced.