biographical info

Darrell Velegol attended West Virginia University for his BS in Chemical Engineering, and he earned his PhD in Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in 1997 working with Professors John L. Anderson and Stephen Garoff. In 1998 Velegol won the Victor K. LaMer Award of the American Chemical Society for the best PhD in the field of Colloid & Surface Science. He continued with a post-doc in the Center for Light Microscope Imaging and Biotechnology at Carnegie Mellon, working under Professor Fred Lanni of the Biology Department.

In June 1999 Velegol joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at Penn State, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2005. Velegol won an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, and in 2003 he led a group in winning an NSF NIRT grant on bottom-up particle assembly. Currently he works with 6 graduate students and numerous undergrad researchers. His research investigates the fabrication of colloidal assemblies and devices, with a specialty in understanding the interparticle forces and sorting processes. His research group uses a wide range of experimental and modeling approaches. Velegol is a member of ACS, AIChE, AAAS, and ASEE.

More recently, he has engaged in studying the “physics of community”, pursuing questions in learning, creativity, motivation, trust and deceit, courage, and other social science ideas using results from physics, chemistry, biology, and chemical engineering. He is applying this research to “Wild Scholars”, which aims to have an impact on grades 7-12 education throughout Pennsylvania and beyond. In 2009 Velegol was promoted to Full Professor at Penn State.