Troy Vogel, teaching professor in the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and director of undergraduate studies, has won the 2025 Service to Chemical Engineering Education Award of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE). AIChE is a professional organization for chemical engineers that has 60,000 members from more than 110 countries.
The AIChE citation recognized his “leadership in American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and AIChE, service as an ABET evaluator, mentorship of student chapters and competitions, and contributions to the journal Chemical Engineering Education.”
Vogel has long been recognized as an innovator in the classroom. At Notre Dame, he teaches the Capstone Design course, junior and senior labs, Career Choices for Engineers, and the elective class Industrial Chemical Processes. He pioneered a course called The Story of Stuff, which places technologies in their historical and cultural contexts.
Since 2017, Vogel has served as advisor for the Notre Dame chapter of AIChE. In that role, he supervises the student club Chem-E-Car, which is dedicated to the design and construction of a car powered by chemical energy for a regional and global competition. Vogel has run the North-Central Regional Chem-E-Car competition since 2015 and served on the national committee overseeing the global competition since 2020.
“Professor Vogel made material engaging by connecting it to real-world applications,” said Elena Morgan ND ’25, now R&D Engineer at Procter and Gamble. “He was an incredible mentor during my time on the Notre Dame Chem-E-Car team. Under his guidance, our club nearly tripled in size, and we even placed in the regional poster competition.”
“Professor Vogel always emphasizes that Chem-E-Car is a learning experience first and a competition second,” said Somia Rehman, McMaster University. “That perspective changed how I approached both the competition and engineering challenges. Rather than focusing on the outcome alone, he taught us to value the process, including experimentation, problem-solving, and teamwork. He also modeled the importance of safety, which is a crucial quality for future chemical engineers.”
In 2023, Vogel won Notre Dame’s top award for undergraduate advising, the Dockweiler Award, after having won a similarly prestigious teaching award at his previous institution, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, he led a committee that redesigned the first year of study for engineering students.
In 2022, he won the AIChE’s Corcoran Award for the most outstanding article published in Chemical Engineering Education. That article shared best practices for creating a virtual teaching environment.
Vogel joined the faculty at Notre Dame in 2017, after serving on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for six years. He received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering at The Ohio State University in 2011.
—Mary Hendriksen, Notre Dame Engineering