Alum spotlight: Millicent Sullivan

Leaders and engineers bring things together so that they can do more than on their own. Millicent Sullivan ('03) applies this to molecules as well as people.

Sullivan is the Alvin B. and Julie O. Stiles Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Delaware. Her path to administration came via opportunities to build something different. When her department wanted to reimagine graduate training in chemical engineering, Sullivan took on the role of associate chair.

"I loved the sense of working with incredibly talented faculty, staff, and students to do something exciting that I couldn't do by myself," she says of that early leadership experience.

Sullivan was also tapped to lead a series of initiatives around biopharmaceutical sciences growth at her university. She credits the technical training in biopharmaceutical formulation sciences that she received at Carnegie Mellon as a key reason why she was selected for the role.

The connection between CMU and her University of Delaware career starts even earlier, with her Ph.D. advisor, Todd Przybycien. His research collaborator at the University of Delaware was Sullivan's first introduction to a community much like the one she was part of at CMU: researchers committed to working together.

During her Ph.D. program, Sullivan developed an interest in designing nanoparticles for gene therapy. She did postdoctoral work in cell and matrix biology at the Benaroya Research Institute and then joined the faculty at the University of Delaware.

We can build useful materials by thinking about how to mimic structures in nature yet tweak them to do what we want.

Millicent Sullivan, Professor and Chair, Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Delaware

She has built her research program around designing biomaterials and drug delivery vehicles for applications in regenerative medicine, including wound healing, bone repair, and cardiovascular repair, as well as targeted therapeutics for breast cancer. Sullivan's approach to new materials starts with a diverse toolbox of molecular building blocks. She thinks creatively about how to assemble these molecular building blocks into nanoparticles, hydrogels, and other interesting materials that can accomplish therapeutic tasks that the molecules on their own would not do.

Nanoscale objects in biology serve as inspiration. "We can build useful materials by thinking about how to mimic structures in nature yet tweak them to do what we want," she says.

When considering design questions, Sullivan stays centered on how the materials she builds will interface with the human body. How long will a material last in a specific environment before it gets degraded? How quickly will a material move across a biological barrier? Does changing the shape or chemistry of the material make it possible to get the material across the biological barrier before it degrades?

"As a chemical engineer, I view the biological environment as a multi-component system with parts that are connected to one another," she says. "There are reactions happening in different locations at different time scales."

Her work designing better medicines also informs her work as an educator. Sullivan emphasizes the importance of showing students where chemical engineering fits in the problem-solving process for technological and social problems. "It's critical that we train our students not just to solve problems, but also to understand how to solve problems they've never even heard of yet," she says.

Sullivan encourages faculty to put their students in situations where they practice with open-ended problems. She recognizes, however, that this can be challenging to execute in the classroom, where it's simpler to have students work on a problem that has a clear, single solution. Internships, research, and interdisciplinary courses all train students to think outside the framework of "first I do A, then I do B, then I do C."

With similarly open-ended thinking throughout her own academic career, Sullivan is a leader in the pursuit of chemical engineering solutions that are as interconnected and dynamic as the challenges they address.