The Chemical Engineering department's research programs are broad and innovative, encompassing traditional and emerging chemical engineering disciplines. The faculty in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Houston have expertise in bioengineering, materials engineering, reaction engineering, catalysis, petroleum and energy engineering, computer aided process engineering as well as fluid/particle separations.

Graduate students are afforded the chance to study and perform research in some of the best-equipped laboratories in the United States and be advised by professors of international reputation. Departmental research equipment includes an X-ray diffractometer with a hot stage, a pulsed excimer-pumped dye laser, a quasielastic laser-light-scattering spectroscopy unit, a computerized axial tomographic scanner (CATscan) system, rheometers, a fluorescence-polarization stopped-flow kinetics apparatus, and a titration microcalorimeter. Additionally, the Department houses numerous workstations and personal computers, including a modern computational cluster of 22 Quad Xeon processors sharing a private gigabit network and raid storage array. Other high performance computing clusters are available for students on campus at TLC2.

The majority of the research performed at the University of Houston, and in most large universities, is funded by outside agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, National Space Biomedical Research Institute, NIST, U.S. Department of Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, Gulf Coast Hazardous-Substances Research Center, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, Texas Hazardous-Waste Research Center, NASA, U.S. Civilian Research & Development Foundation, Environmental Institute of Houston, UH Institute for Space Systems Operation,and the Baylor College of Medicine. Projects have also been funded from many industrial sources such as Exxon Chemical Company, the Dow Chemical Company, BASF Corporation, Mobil Oil Corporation, British Petroleum Exploration, DuPont Dow Elastomers, Kellogg Brown & Root, Frito-Lay, Inc., Halliburton Energy Services, and many others.