03 / EDUCATION
Connecting Engineering Education with Industry.
Entering his 11th year of collaboration with Cornell University in 2026–2027, Darren King brings real consumer product and process-design challenges into the senior chemical engineering classroom. Through project design, weekly mentoring, and technical reviews, he helps students connect engineering fundamentals with the decisions that shape products, manufacturing, and commercial viability.
An Ongoing Collaboration with Cornell University's
Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
A Cornell Chemical Engineering graduate from the Class of '02, Darren began this volunteer collaboration in the 2016–2017 academic year as the course’s first partner from outside Cornell’s faculty. He works weekly with faculty and student teams from the initial project brief through the final technical assessment.
60–100 Hours Annually
Volunteer project development, mentoring, and assessment.
70+ Students Mentored
More than 70 students across the first ten years of the collaboration.
Visit Cornell Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering
How the Collaboration Has Evolved
2016–2026: Senior Consumer Product Design
CHEME 4630 — Practice of Chemical Engineering Product Design
Working alongside Cornell faculty, Darren helped shape a three-credit senior spring course built around practical consumer product challenges. Procter & Gamble served as a corporate sponsor during this phase. Teams explored naturally derived body wash, laundry soap, deodorant, and bar soap, with complementary material-synthesis work.
Projects connected consumer needs with formulation, prototyping, performance testing, manufacturing, sustainability, and business evaluation.
2026–2027: Senior Process Design
CHEME 4620 — Senior Process Design
For the Spring 2027 project, King Innovation Works, LLC is sponsoring work focused on the manufacturing economics of bioactive signaling peptides for consumer skincare.
Students will evaluate scalable downstream isolation and purification, continuous solvent recovery, and process economics using ChemCAD or Aspen Plus.
SPRING 2027 / PLANNED PROJECT
From Project Brief to Final Presentation
Darren contributes as an industry collaborator and mentor, working alongside Cornell faculty.
Define the Challenge
Develop project proposals with Cornell faculty and establish practical success criteria.
Mentor the Teams
Introduce the industry context and provide weekly office hours for student project teams.
Review the Work
Assess midpoint progress, challenge assumptions, and evaluate final presentations and deliverables.
Connect Science with Decisions
Bring industry experience to choices involving performance, manufacturing, cost, sustainability, and commercialization.
Real Challenges. Applied Engineering.
Educational design challenges—not claims of commercial launches or proven outcomes.
Naturally Derived Consumer Products
Body wash, laundry soap, deodorant, and bar soap projects challenged students to balance ingredient choices, consumer experience, performance, stability, and cost.
Renewable Surfactant Design
Students explored routes from renewable feedstocks to cleaning ingredients, linking reaction design and separations with usable product performance.
Beyond the Prototype
Teams evaluated scale-up, process flows, quality and safety, packaging life-cycle impacts, intellectual property, and the business case for development.
Making Skincare Peptide Manufacturing More Accessible
The Spring 2027 project will evaluate downstream purification and solvent-recovery options that could lower manufacturing costs. Students will build process models, equipment-sizing estimates, mass and energy balances, and a techno-economic assessment.
Peptide synthesis is a defined input; the engineering scope is downstream isolation, purification, and solvent recovery.
Students will distinguish manufacturing cost—the expense of making the product—from the selling price needed to support investment and commercial viability.
Engineering That Connects the Full Picture
Skills practiced through the collaboration, connecting technical work with practical decisions.
Consumer Insight
Market assessment, voice of the customer, and translating needs into specifications.
Experimental Design
Structured experiments, prototyping, performance testing, and stability evaluation.
Process Engineering
Material synthesis, separation processes, scale-up, and process simulation.
Commercial Judgment
Manufacturing economics, investment analysis, and commercialization decisions.
Responsible Design & IP
Sustainability, life-cycle assessment, safety, regulatory, and intellectual property considerations.
Technical Communication
Project briefs, progress reviews, final reports, and recommendations.
Bring Industry Experience into Your Classroom.
Interested in connecting engineering or consumer product science with practical industry challenges? Darren welcomes conversations with universities and other educational organizations about project collaborations, guest lectures, student mentoring, and applied workshops.
Email Darren About Education