Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering Daniel Anastasio, PhD, is a co-recipient of the American Society for Engineering Education Chemical Engineering Division’s prestigious William H. Corcoran Award for outstanding scholastic achievement in chemical engineering education.

Sponsored by Eastman Chemical, the award is presented annually to the author(s) of the most outstanding article published in the Chemical Engineering Education journal.

Anastasio contributed to the article, “Revealing the Decision-Making Processes of Chemical Engineering Students in Process Safety Contexts,” as the result of research on experiential process safety training supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program. 

Anastasio shares co-authorship of the winning paper with his research collaborators Cheryl Bodnar, PhD, and Brittany Butler of Rowan University, Daniel Burkey, PhD, of the University of Connecticut, Matthew Cooper, PhD, of North Carolina State University, and Emily Dringenberg, PhD, of the Ohio State University.

A member of the Rose-Hulman chemical engineering faculty since 2015, Anastasio has an extensive research background in engineering pedagogy, with a special focus on game-based learning and laboratory experiment design. He has also studied membrane separations for desalination and water purification. He was the co-recipient of a North American Membrane Society Education Innovation Fellowship with fellow Rose-Hulman professor Marissa Tousley, PhD, in 2020.

Anastasio’s areas of teaching include fluid mechanics, heat and mass transport, and process control, and his safety training research has been used to enhance Rose-Hulman’s senior-year chemical engineering professional practice course. He also has helped contribute makerspace-type resources such as 3D printing and prototyping to the department and is interested in programs that help get pre-college students interested in science and engineering.

Anastasio earned bachelor’s and doctorate degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Connecticut in 2009 and 2015, respectively.