When I was growing up in western Pennsylvania, we used to have notebooks in school with a map of the state on the cover. Back then (1960s), local children quickly learned that by tracing the boundaries of certain counties, one…
Last month, I had the rare honor of sitting down with about 40 students from Booker T. Washington High School’s engineering magnet school (Houston), who are all on the path toward careers in science and engineering. While the experience itself…
Innovation is the key to economic growth, and research and development (R&D) is key to innovation. While industry recognizes that R&D is vital to longterm success, it focuses, of course, on marketable results from research — after all, R&D is…
When it first became a player in the global chemical process industries (CPI), China was framed purely as an opportunity for reducing the costs to produce goods that are consumed elsewhere. More recently, the picture has broadened to include a…
Any chemical engineer can attest to the fact that safety is an ongoing pursuit in our profession, where we occasionally find our teams taking two steps forward and then one step back. Foreseeing and avoiding every type of equipment malfunction…
Next month, on May 5th, the American Chemical Society (ACS; Washington, D.C.; http://www.acs.org) and more than 200 other private- and public-sector organizations representing more than 6.5 million science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) professionals will celebrate the first National Lab…
Late last month, in an event at the White House, the U.S. National Science Board (NSB) released its Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 report. Produced every two years by NSB — the governing body for the National Science Foundation (NSF;…
Like it or not, 2009 will go down as a year when massive structural change began in the chemicals business. We are far from feeling the full effects of the upheaval, but there is a sense of revolution in the…
Early next month, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will hold its award ceremonies for the 2009 Nobel Prizes, the winners of which were announced in October. The prestigious awards are arguably the most high-profile recognitions of the two cornerstones…
The first round of judging in Chemical Engineering's 2009 Kirkpatrick Chemical Engineering Achievement Award competition (CE, January, p. 19) has produced the following five finalists (in alphabetical order): • The Dow Chemical Co. (Midland, Mich.) and BASF SE (Ludwigshafen, Germany),…