One of the first things Hannah Lenkowski noticed when she arrived at the University of Tennessee in 2023 as a PhD student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) was the absence of a ChemE-Sports team. Lenkowski had participated in the event throughout her undergraduate studies at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), and the experience changed her life.
Lenkowski wanted UT students to potentially reap the same benefits, so she approached CBE administrators about forming a team. They encouraged Lenkowski to move ahead with the plan and paired her with CBE Assistant Professor of Practice Brandon Stevens to help launch the team.
“ChemE-Sports was such a big deal in my education. In addition to providing me with leadership and teaching skills, being a part of a team and learning to work together with other people was extremely beneficial,” Lenkowski said. “I feel like it prepared for grad school in the sense of learning to have questions and then figuring them out for myself by working through them.”
Organized by AIChE, the world’s leading organization for chemical engineering professionals, the ChemE-Sports Competition is designed to simulate real-world engineering challenges, allowing students to apply their theoretical knowledge in practical settings. The spring competition is held virtually, and the fall competition t is held at the national AIChE Student Conference. Nearly 300 teams took part in the 2025 fall competition last November.
The simulation used for the annual competition allows students to fully operate a control panel for a chemical engineering system, such as an amine gas treating unit. The students must work together to safely optimize their system to maximize profit while also maintaining safe conditions. Then, they must learn to troubleshoot and mitigate disaster when the system simulates a breakage or major error within the plant.
“Hannah was extremely influential in getting UT to form a ChemE sports team in 2023. As I was new to learning about the competition, she helped guide the students through practice exercises and how to best prepare for the competition,” Stevens said. “She traveled with us to Orlando, and I know that the students really appreciated her insights into how the competition works. She really values process safety, and this drives her desire to see students compete in the ChemE Sports program.”
Becoming a Team Leader
Lenkowski first participated in ChemE-Sports in 2020 as a sophomore at NJIT. By her junior year, she was captain of the student-run team. She led NJIT to a fifth-place finish in the world and second place in the country as a senior.
“I threw myself into it and really enjoyed it,” she said. “I was putting together lesson plans and designing exercises and basically assigning homework problems and coming up with ways to trip up my students and then guide them through and figuring out how to learn.”
After helping launch UT’s team, Lenkowski was offered a role at the national level of the ChemE-Sports Competition, which required her to step away from directly assisting UT’s team. She is now co-director of the competition, becoming the first and only student to help design and run the international competitions.
But she knows UT’s ChemE-Sports students are in good hands with Stevens guiding the team.
“Working with Professor Stevens has been amazing. I have never met a professor that is just so dedicated to teaching,” Lenkowski said. “I’m a teaching assistant for one of his classes, and just by being his TA, I’m learning so much about what it means to be a professor. Just the way he’s able to help these students is incredible.”
Teaching Future Engineers
Lenkowski has been doing her PhD work under CBE Professor Paul Dalhaimer. Her research involves lipid nanoparticles on the aging immune system.
“I’m studying their delivery. I’m try to see where they are going in the body, and how fast are they getting there,” she said. “Then, I’m comparing it across a different range of ages, and I’m trying to see if that’s changing with age, and if we should take it into consideration.”
Although her research focus lies within the biomolecular side of CBE and drifts toward immunology, Lenkowski will always be proud to be a chemical engineer. Her experience with ChemE-Sports not only made her appreciate the role chemical engineers play in society, but it also exposed her to a potential career path.
“Ideally, I want to eventually be a professor,” she said. “Honestly, from this competition, I learned how much I really like teaching and mentoring and getting to be a part of something like that.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)