Professor of the Day: Professor Michael Shuler, Chemical Engineering, Cornell University

Professor Michael Louis Shuler is the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering with a joint appointment in the Institute of Food Science at Cornell University in New York. He is also Director of the Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering Program at Cornell University. Professor Shuler's areas of research include structured models, heterologous protein expression systems, cell culture analogs for pharmacokinetic models, multidrug resistance mechanisms; in vitro toxicology; plant cell tissue culture, biodegradation and bioremediation.

Professor Shuler graduated with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Notre Dame, Indiana in 1969 and earned a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1973. He then joined the faculty of Cornell's School of Chemical Engineering in 1974, and in 1992 was appointed the Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Chemical Engineering. During his tenure at Cornell, Professor Shuler has been invited to serve as visiting or guest professor at several universities including the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1988 and the Institute for Biotechnology in Zurich, Switzerland in 1995.

Professor Shuler's contributions to his profession have been widely recognized and have earned him numerous honors such as the Marvin J. Johnson Award of the Microbial and Biochemical Technology Division of the ACS, an AIChE Professional Progress Award, and an Amgen Award in Biochemical Engineering. He has gained membership to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of the Arts and Sciences. In 1992, he was elected as an inaugural fellow to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and in 1997 he was voted fellow to the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1997.

Professor Shuler has many publications to his merit and serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals such as Biotechnology Progress, on which he served as editor-in-chief from 1985 to 1988. Also to his credit, professor Shuler has U.S. patents for several of his inventions, including "Use of Inhibitory Solvents in Multi-Membrane Reactor," and "Apparatus and Process to Eliminate Diffusional Limitations in a Membrane Bioreactor by Pressure Cycling," both of which were selected by NASA as Class I NASA Tech Brief.

The research conducted by Michael Shuler focuses on applying chemical reaction engineering principles to biological systems. As part of this work his research group has developed a new approach to model individual cells mathematically.

These models have proven to be important conceptual tools used to test hypotheses about cellular mechanisms and the interaction of viruses and cells. One model of a "minimal cell" is being used to relate genomic instructions to cell physiology.

Another project combines mathematical models of subcellular and cellular mechanisms with whole-animal models as a means to relate the rapidly increasing insight into molecular toxicology and pharmacology with animal physiology. The organs of mathematical models are compared with physical models that use living cells to mimic organs such as the liver and lung.

Dr. Shuler also is investigating targeted drug delivery to multidrug-resistant cancer cells.

Further info available at the Cornell University website.