Entering a Golden Age of Chemical Engineering

• Date
  Tue, Mar 12

  Time
  12:30 PM — 1:45 PM

  Address
  Steinman Hall
  St 160 - Lecture Hall
  

  Location
  Steinman Hall, 160 - Lecture Hall

  p: 212.650.5748

  Admission
  Free

• Event Details

  The Chemical Engineering Department would like to welcome AIChE President, Phillip Westmoreland

  Chemical engineers are heroes and heroines who can help the world fill its needs and achieve its finest aspirations. How? Why? Consider these trends:
  
  -manufacturing’s shift to emphasize processes and properties
  -the new abundance of hydrocarbon resources
  -biology’s turning into a molecular science
  -computing’s evolution into a cyberinfrastructure
  -society’s need for the breadth and problem-solving approaches of chemical engineering
  
  Chemical engineering is defined broadly by the range of our work. Oil, gas, and petrochemicals are key sectors for our profession, and the excitement about new opportunities there is high. At the same time, we have long records of achievement in pharma, polymers, food, nuclear power, environmental control, paper, and packaging. ChEs are also taking leading roles in new areas as diverse as tissue engineering, personalized medicine, nanotechnology, petascale computing, sustainability metrics, and microfluidics.  Process engineering and R&D are the important aspects, yet we also bring our skills to bear on management, finance, design, sales, technical service, testing, human resources, law, medicine, government, space flight, and more.
  
  I’ve been probing these ideas in a blog on AIChE's chenected.aiche.org website and have heard from members around the world that they see the same things. In my talk, I'll expand on these ideas, providing illustrations from my work and experience.
  
  Phillip R. Westmoreland is 2013 President of AIChE. He is Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State Univ. (NCSU) and Executive Director of the NCSU Institute for Computational Science and Engineering. His chemical engineering degrees are from NCSU (BS, 1973), Louisiana State Univ. (MS, 1974), and MIT (PhD, 1986). He has worked in coal research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory/Union Carbide (1974–1979), as a ChE faculty member at the Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst (1986–2009), and as a program director at the National Science Foundation (2006–2009).