The Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh is in the process of redesigning its undergraduate curriculum based on a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) entitled "Pillars of Chemical Engineering: A Block Scheduled Curriculum" (J. J. McCarthy, PI). The curriculum team - composed of eleven faculty from Chemical as well as Industrial Engineering - is implementing a plan to reform the undergraduate Chemical Engineering curriculum into a series of six "pillar" courses. This plan was developed as part of NSF's program for Department-Level Reform of Engineering Curricula (2002), and is the basis for the larger implementation project currently underway.

In my presentation, I will briefly outline the concepts behind the rescheduling of our undergraduate courses and then detail some of the steps taken to-date to implement these ideas in the redesigned Reactor Kinetics – now called ‘Reactive Process Engineering' - course.