There may be years worth of dust accumulated on the fermentation reactor, which has been hidden away in what some nowadays call the Iacocca dungeon, but the history unearthed has quite the story to tell.
Before being left to go fallow in 2000, the unit was designed and built under one of the first Department of Energy (DOE) Research Equipment Grants. The grant was awarded to Janice A. Phillips, Ph.D., then Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical Engineering, and Bland S. Montenecourt, Ph.D., then Associate Professor, Department of Biology, in 1984. The Research Equipment Grant Program was intended to provide researchers involved in DOE research programs at universities with equipment that would facilitate the research and development mission of the agency. Both Professors Phillips and Montenecourt - along with Arthur E. Humphrey, Ph.D., then Provost and Professor of Chemical Engineering - had collaborated over several years on programs aimed at developing the microbiology and process technology required to convert various sources of biomass into renewable fuels and chemical feedstocks. The system was intended to provide a critical resource that was not, at the time, available to investigators involved in this field, i.e., a microbial fermentation unit in which they could demonstrate their technologies at pilot scale.
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The system was used to support both Ph.D. (Michael T. Reilly, ‘87 ) and M.S. (Samson H. Lee, ’97) theses. In addition, it was key in supporting a variety of development projects for both start-up and established organizations evaluating biotechnologies that ranged from bioinsecticides to microbial enzymes, some under the support the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern and Southeastern PA as part of university-industry programs conducted under the BioProcessing Institute.
This grant from DOE and the resulting advanced experimental facilities put Lehigh at the forefront of research aimed at developing a variety of technologies for facilitating the scale-up, monitoring and control of processes for production of biological products at commercial scale.
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