Sergio Mendez, PhD

Chemical Engineering, CSULB

Dr. Mendez was born and raised in the Los Angeles area. After graduating from high school, he engaged in world-wide adventures during his four-year enlistment in the United States Marine Corps. He then studied chemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and received his B.S. degree. He landed a dream job as a Thin Films Process Engineer at Intel Corporation in Silicon Valley where he worked on the physical vapor deposition process to make CPU chips. A couple years later, Dr. Mendez entered the doctoral program at the University of New Mexico where his dissertation was about thermoresponsive polymer thin films. After obtaining his Ph.D., he moved on to Cornell University where he served as a post-doctoral scholar. While at Cornell, he published in the area of molecular self-assembly. In addition to these projects, he also was trained in microfluidics and lateral flow assays.

Dr. Mendez has been in the Department of Chemical Engineering faculty since 2009. During his tenure at CSULB, he has transitioned to the research fields of biofuels and biomaterials. More recently, he has delved into biomedical device development as well as chemical process control and automation.

Ahmad is an undergraduate student working in the area of phase equilibria thermodynamics. He took the initiative to write a Matlab program from scratch to model vapor liquid equilibrium of non-ideal mixtures.

After earning his B.S. degree at U.C. Irvine, Kevin obtained a position as a field service engineer. As a CSULB graduate student, his project is in the area of Low Global Warming potential refrigerants.