ChE senior Rebecca Ellington receives AIChE McCormack Award
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UIC’s chemical engineering department selected Rebecca Ellington to receive the 2023 Henry McCormack Outstanding Senior Award. The award is given out each year by the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE).
Ellington was one of the department’s top senior students, graduating in May with a 3.98 GPA. During her time at UIC, Ellington was very active in research, tutoring, interning, and with the UIC AIChE student chapter. She also worked with Clinical Associate Professor Betul Bilgin in the suburb of University Park with water safety testing through the National Science Foundation’s S-STEM program.
“Rebecca was in my senior unit operations lab this year and really understood the experiments and teamwork involved,” said Alan Zadunek, clinical associate professor and director of undergraduate studies. “As treasurer of the AIChE student chapter, she was a major part of the successful AIChE North-Central Regional Student conference that we hosted this spring. It was a lot of fun working with her on the conference this year!”
Ellington served as the outreach chair in her junior year and as the treasurer in her senior year for the AIChE student chapter. In addition, her enthusiasm for chemical engineering inspired many students to become more active in the AIChE UIC Student Chapter.
Ellington’s VBA programming skills helped in the development of a chemical engineering Excel calculator, which lead her to a process automation internship at ProleiT by Schneider Electric in the summer of 2022.
Ellington also served as a mentor for incoming students as a peer leader for the physics calc-based mechanics course for engineers at UIC.
She received the Henry McCormack Outstanding Senior Award at a meeting and award ceremony in April.
With a job already lined up after graduation, Ellington will work at ProleiT by Schneider Electric as a process automation engineer. Fueled by her love of travel and experiencing new cultures, in the future, she plans to attend either the Technical University of Berlin for a master’s degree in polymer science or the Technical University of Hamburg for a master’s degree in chemical process engineering.