Abstract

"Building the Future of Chemical Engineering Practice and Education"

The future of chemical engineering is bright because its fundamental strengths are crucial for society's technological needs. At the same time, achieving these successes will require re-evaluation and expansive re-thinking of what chemical engineering is. Its formal origins in the late 1800s recognized that industrial applications of reactions, contacting, and phase equilibrium were being carried out in "unit operations," process components that shared physical principles mostly to make industrial chemicals. Using biological reactions is much older, but reactants, agents, products, and stoichiometries were wholly empirical and not understood. Batch distillation was adapted to refine fossil fuels during the Civil War, and the resulting products and byproducts began to be chemical feedstocks. In the past 100 years, chemical engineering became applied molecular science as chemistry, then materials, and finally biology began to be molecular sciences. Moving into the future, chemical engineering has become the leading engineering discipline that translates molecular science into products, helping meet societal needs for health, food, water, and energy. Furthermore, chemical engineering is the leading model for transitioning traditional disciplines into being transdisciplinary. In our intellectual and professional culture, we are comfortable with being defined by chemical engineering core knowledge, not by restrictive fences. We must re-frame what this core knowledge is. Meanwhile, both students and professionals must expand the transdisciplinary concept, deepening and broadening our technical applications while becoming more sophisticated about collaborating with, advising, and learning from other experts in science, engineering, and non-STEM fields -- including the arena of public opinion and communications.