Extreme Engineer of the Month

Education: B.S. in Chemical Engineering, Michigan State University M.S. in Chemical Engineering, University of Kentucky Ph.D. in Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, University of Kentucky Favorite Classes: Heat transfer because it was something she sees all around her in everyday life. It was interesting to know the science behind it and to calculate the equations. Best Skills: Communication. She particularly enjoys brainstorming sessions, drawing out new ideas, and keeping the design team on target. Hobbies: She hasn't had many hobbies, but as a mother, she is now enjoying scrapbooking. It provides an artistic outlet, where the goal is to keep everything in a straight line. Role Models: One of her regrets in life is not finding role models or mentors to guide her earlier in life. It wasn't until graduate school that she found several women professors to look up to and model herself after. Advice: "Be active and keep your eyes open. Go out and find information for yourself—something I didn't do. Follow your dreams."

While both of her grandfathers were engineers, Czar got to college without an awareness of the profession and what it entailed. Her favorite subjects in school were always math and science. In fifth grade she remembers telling her parents that she wanted to be the one to make Crest toothpaste "new and improved." Her family has yet to let her forget that. In high school she started thinking about chemistry. Specifically, she was interested in using her knowledge to make new things-and that's where engineering fit.

However, she didn't discover that connection until she had already enrolled as a chemistry major at Michigan State University. "Engineering was not well publicized in high school—and particularly not to females," she says. Her entry-level chemistry classes had a lot of chemical engineering majors in them, and as someone who enjoys math, she was taking calculus classes as well as chemistry classes. Her chemistry friends wondered why she was taking calculus, and her engineering major friends wondered why she was a chemistry major if she was taking calculus.

The truth is that she had always wanted to be an engineer, she just didn't know what it was. She always wanted to be the one to make the new things and put the pieces together in terms of math and science. With this realization, Czar went to her counselor and switched majors. Fortunately since the decision came early in her college career and she had been taking calculus, it was not a problem. She didn't have any courses to make up.

Czar got a bachelor's in chemical engineering and then a masters in chemical engineering. Then she discovered biosystems engineering. "This is probably what I wanted to do all along; I just didn't know about it," she says. "I love biological engineering because of the ties to biology and chemistry and all the pieces that go into it. And it is about doing things better for human kind."

One thing she really likes about the field is that it is an applied discipline with some overlap with more fundamental disciplines of engineering such as mechanical and electrical engineering. It uses many of the same disciplines, using them in different ways to solve different problems. "We take those systems and refocus them on biological engineering problems," she says.

Czar explains it this way: "As a chemical engineer, you are taking chemicals and reworking them to make new products. As a biological engineering you are not always reworking or changing biology. You're using biology and building things around that biology to get products you want."

After getting her Ph.D. in biosystems/agricultural engineering at the University of Kentucky, Czar was hired as a member of the faculty there and became an assistant professor of biosystems and agricultural engineering. In addition to teaching classes, she is conducting research on ethanol and biodiesel.

A key project Czar is working on is new methods to produce ethanol. "If we're really going to use ethanol, we're going to need new more fully utilize our resources and use lignocellulosic feedstock."

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lignocellulose Lignocellulosic biomass[1] refers to plant biomass that is composed of cellulose and hemicellulose, and lignin. The carbohydrate polymers (cellulose and hemicelluloses) are tightly bound to the lignin, by hydrogen and covalent bonds. Biomass comes in many different types, which may be grouped into four main categories: wood residues, including sawmill and paper mill discards, municipal paper waste, agricultural residues, including corn stover (stalks and straw), and sugarcane bagasse, and dedicated energy crops, which are mostly composed of fast growing tall, woody grasses.

She says that a lignocellulosic feedstock, for example, would be the stalks, cobs, husks, and leaves of the corn plant, everything but the grain. These are the parts of the plant are typically a agricultural waste products. They still have carbohydrates and sugars in them, but they have to be broken down to get the energy out. Her research is looking for cheaper ways to do this and ways that farmers can do this pretreatment on the farm so we're not transporting large amounts of biomasses long distance, but rather transporting the sugar feedstock to the ethanol facility.

Biodiesel is another promising area of research. This comes from an oil crop—such as soybean oil or even recycled cooking oil. By adding methanol and a catalyst and through a process called transesterification, biodiesel and glycerol are produced — with glycerol as the byproduct. Specifically, her research focuses on developing new catalyst systems to produce a better product with less waste. They are changing from a liquid catalyst to a solid catalyst because it is easier to remove after processing.

Biodiesel is particularly promising because you can use it without modifying engines. Another benefit is that it is energy balanced—you get more energy out than the energy it takes to produce it.

Her career goals include exciting more young people about careers in bioengineering. In addition to research, Czar teaches classes on energy and biological systems-from pre-engineering classes (such as thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid flow) to graduate level courses in energy and thermodynamic processing of biomass cells. In addition she teaches probability and statistics. "There is lots of randomness and variation in biological systems," she says.