The ChE Department at the UPRM is the only BS, MS, and PhD-granting ChE program in Puerto Rico, Latin America, and the Caribbean that is accredited by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET). It is the leading source of Hispanic ChEs, especially females, in the United States. The department has 23 faculty members (20 Hispanic US citizens, two of them female) and close to 650 undergraduate students of which 68% are female. For more than a decade, the ChE Department has produced over 110 Bachelor of Science, and 5 Master of Science/Engineering graduates per year. During these years, the ChE Department has transitioned from a department focused on maintaining the excellence of its undergraduate program into a department that recognizes the importance of combining education with research.
The doctoral degree program officially started in January 2000 and is one of only four ChE PhD programs based in Hispanic-Serving Institutions in the nation. Furthermore, with its goal of producing five PhD graduates per year, the UPRM ChE PhD program has the potential of becoming an important contributor of bilingual Hispanic ChE PhD professionals. By comparison, according to the NSF Survey of earned doctorates (NSF-04303), an average of 12 doctoral degrees per year have been awarded to Hispanics over the past ten years. Still, research productivity in the department has been low, with only 41 peer-reviewed publications between 2000 and 2006. Part of the problem is a lack of “Research Culture.” This translates into a lack of peer-learning mechanisms which are common at institutions with a long tradition of scholarly productivity (e.g., whereas a student at a research intensive institution can turn to his/her peers for advice on preparing, lets say, a first manuscript, students at UPRM have no such peer-learning mechanisms). Developing this “culture” is extremely important to the success of the PhD program.
With this goal in mind we are developing seminars and workshops on manuscript and proposal preparation for students and young faculty.
