This section discusses those issues directly related to academic staff, their training, rewards and pressures, and their working environment. The organisation of the section deals chronologically from the point of entry into an academic appointment, through to securing tenure.

For those Ph.D. graduates who chose to follow an academic path rather than enter industry, the annual recruitment round is fiercely competitive. Departments will often receive around 200 applications for one post, with approximately half of these from the US. There is a healthy supply of good people to fill the available positions – the same cannot be said of the UK where many recently appointed staff have come from overseas, and the number of UK applicants has been minuscule. At the top level in the USA, it has been suggested that there are some 30 excellent candidates and perhaps 50 open positions in any one year. This has led to a strong competition for the available applicants who are good enough to reach the very high standards required to obtain a tenured position in the best departments.

Candidates tend to be in the final stages of their Ph.D. and will visit several departments interviewing and giving seminars. The appointment process is usually spread out over several months. The whole of the department is usually involved with the selection process, with all staff meeting and talking with each of the candidates. Departments are generally looking for very strong researchers and will take the best person available – although there may be some constraints on which fields are acceptable, depending on the department’s long term strategy.

US departments have a record of appointing many staff who do not have a chemical engineering background (Figure ASM.1). In fact, more than one third of staff do not come from with a chemical engineering background, compared to only a quarter for the UK (Figure ASM.2). This has led to departments whose staff have skills and expertise, which are diverse, but complimentary. Staff interact [especially] with pure science departments, and this is thought to be one key in promoting strong multidisciplinary research. It is interesting to note that seven percent of UK staff had a background in a different engineering discipline, yet we saw no evidence of this at all in the US – all non chemical engineers came from the pure sciences.

There is an increasing tendency for chemical engineers to take a 12-18 month long postdoctoral position before taking up the academic position which they may have already been offered (M.I.T. in fact requires this). This period allows time to develop a research strategy distinct from that of their Ph.D. advisor, submit research proposals, and learn new techniques often in an allied research field. Many of these posts are taken in non chemical engineering departments, and are commonly in a pure science environment. This is vital for the acquisition of new skills and techniques and leads to a strong tendency for US chemical engineers to move into new specialisations for example: materials (electronic, polymers, bio-medical), complex fluids, tissue engineering, biotechnology, bio-medical and the clinical sciences, applied mathematics, and molecular modelling. Staff now tend to consider themselves to be developing "products rather than processes", and are adopting the tools and skills which have arisen in other disciplines. For example, genetic manipulation is a tool of

molecular biologists which is of use to biochemical engineers, so it is learnt in the appropriate department, and brought into their chemical engineering environment, to be practised and exploited in a way appropriate to chemical engineering.

The UK situation is a little different. UK staff are also increasingly undertaking postdoctoral work (Figure ASM.3.), but the distribution shown in Figure ASM.5 of destination departments is quite different from that of the US (Figure ASM.4.). Of UK postdoctoral positions, 50% have been spent in chemical engineering departments whereas only 19% are in the USA. Of the other 50% most of these have done a postdoc in the same discipline as their Ph.D. In the USA even those with science Ph.Ds have moved disciplines for a postdoctoral period. The US staff virtually always move to a different establishment at each stage of their career, and the proportion of US staff changing the type of department which they work in has been constantly growing. This change now mostly happens at the postdoc stage, and we believe that this mobility is a major contributor to the current differences between the types of research carried out in the USA and the UK.

US postdocs are on average paid approximately $30-35K p.a. - a relatively poor salary by US standards. Therefore there is no incentive to do a string of postdocs. They acquire the skills they need, and move on up the academic ladder. Only rarely will a chemical engineer do a postdoc before moving to industry.

Upon appointment, good start-up packages are offered to all new staff by the university. The total sums range from $50K for a computationally based worker, to $500K for an experimentalist, with the typical package at around $235K. The packages typically include

• Summer salaries for 2 years
• Support for 2 graduate students
• Equipment
• Laboratory refurbishment

These packages have become necessary in order to attract the very best people to apply for academic positions, and they get staff off to a good start. The US considers this approach to be vital if staff are to be productive from the start and achieve the high standards required by the tenure process. One can see that the whole system is more professional because the high quality staff are given the opportunity to fulfil their potential. This atmosphere of professionalism, and provision of the necessary tools for the job helps to attract high quality postgraduate students into the academic profession. In the UK it is common for a new member of staff to only receive a new computer and some consumables money. Some departments are able to offer more, but the sums, whilst welcome, are small.

Starting salaries range between $50K-70K (paid over 9 months), with the higher rate tending to be paid at the top universities. They are comparable with what staff would achieve if they went into industry instead. During the summer it is usual to get paid for at least one extra month from grants (in the first two years this is covered by the starter package). There are no national or local pay scales in the US, and so salaries are different for different disciplines and different universities and different members of staff. Chemical engineers are paid substantially more than those in many other disciplines. According to the 1998 ‘Annual Survey of US Chemical Engineering Departments’ by the Council for Chemical Research, the average full professor salary was $84,451 (nine months only). UK salary levels are a significant difficulty for chemical engineers as they are now equivalent to only the bottom quartile of the equivalent industrial salaries and fall some 30% below an industry norm. The inequity between industry and academia is now so great, that it is dramatically affecting the recruitment of both staff and postgraduate students. Even the best chemical engineering departments find it difficult to recruit chemical engineers from the UK as postgraduate students.

Further support for new academics is afforded in a number ways: for example, during the first year of appointment, the teaching and administration loads were considerably reduced, and often a period free from such duties right at the start of appointment was granted (usually one semester). This allows young staff to concentrate on setting up a laboratory, and getting their research going, and only once they had established themselves were they plunged into the full timetable of academic life. This is also practised in some UK departments.

There was considerable evidence of lighter administrative loads in the USA. When asked about how they spent their time US academics mentioned that research accounted for 50% of their time (Figure ASM.6). Many regarded time spent on grant proposal writing and reporting as administration, as was time spent managing postgraduate student’s research.

In addition, the levels of bureaucracy imposed upon the university and individual departments appear to be considerably lower than in the UK. There were no reports of centralised quality assurance, or research assessment reports and visits (RAE, TQA, QAA etc) that have so much affected productivity in UK academia over recent years. US research rankings are compiled by a number of independent bodies. Only engineering accreditation required a visitation (once every five years). However, research visits were made to centres by the funding agencies.

Often as a result of collaborations, either via centres or other means, a significant number of staff were made ‘adjunct faculty’ to another department (and vice-versa). This honorary appointment enables academics, amongst other things, to supervise Ph.D. students in the partner department. Such links formed by chemical engineers are often with pure science departments, and clearly demonstrate commitment to a multidisciplinary approach to science and engineering. A more firm arrangement than ‘adjunct faculty’, in the form of a joint appointment of a member of staff between two departments might be made.

Once through the initial stages of setting up their laboratory, new staff have to turn their attention to getting through the tenure process. The tenure system is a major challenge to young academics - on hiring they have up to 6 years to prove themselves before they can be appointed permanently (with tenure). Even in the strongest departments over 80% of staff successfully cleared this hurdle, in most it was over 95%, which indicates that the extensive and very careful selection procedure is justified.

The primary means of assessing suitability for tenure is by letters of recommendation or support from not only peers in the USA, but also international researchers. They are expected to write detailed critiques of the work of the prospective academic. In this way, it is intended to measure the impact of publications and other research outputs. Generally, the requirement for tenure was to have achieved significant results such that the external view is that they are at or near the top of their peer group in their chosen sub-field, with no uniform consensus that a rival is better. Achieving tenure is far less dependent upon the level of fundraising from industry, the number of research grants, or contribution to administrative duties. However, teaching ability was cited as important in that one had to be at the very least mediocre and anything less was unacceptable. Consequently, there is a great deal of pressure on staff for the first few years before tenure.

This means that success at tenure requires the candidate to be visible in the community. This drives staff to attend conferences, give papers, network with colleagues in their field and to work on programme committees for AIChE meetings (or other equivalent professional bodies), spending up to to one week every month on these activities. They will need to get repeated research funding, publish refereed journal papers and become personally well known so that they can acquire the eight to ten letters of recommendation from external sources. The system operated in the USA achieves this aim. This is a higher expectation than we would make in the UK for someone with only 6 years teaching experience as a condition of further employment. On the other hand in the UK there is much less assistance and funding available. The salaries are not geared to attract enough of the highest quality people.

Staff responded to the need for visibility in various ways which reflected more their own personalities than anything which was actually externally imposed. Some chose to be very adventurous to achieve visibility and distinction, others chose to be safe and sure. Some claimed that the need to demonstrate independent excellence mitigated against extensive collaboration, though the best candidates collaborated regardless. By the same token, there were some who said that the tenure process drove them to have many collaborations. We believe that the process simply drives and stimulates people to work in the way which suits them (or they believe suits them). People interpret the demands of the tenure process according to their personality. The high-risk takers often said that they realised that perhaps they had taken more of a risk than they realised at the time, but most departments have a very healthy attitude towards such situations. Knowing that they had this support from their department for such strategies, the individuals cited this approach as one of the factors why they decided to become academics in the first place, and it was one of the reasons which helped drive them so hard. Formal or informal mentoring of young staff was used by nearly all departments to aid academics through the tenure hurdle.

However, the young staff were not ‘apprenticed’ to a senior member of staff. This was reflected through there not being a need to have senior academics on grant applications for them to be successful.

Further assisting staff, and particularly young staff, was the existence of centres with large, locally administered, block funds. These could be given to support novel project ideas but demanded collaboration which then became inevitable in these locations. Those young staff associated with such centres were highly complimentary of the benefits (in terms of early career support) which they derived from them. By way of return, staff are under considerable pressure to not only succeed, but to excel in their field.

The requirement of achieving impact in the chosen field of research is a subjective measure. On the tenure track, it is not possible for an individual to be certain that they have reached a sufficient level. There is also a risk losing some high quality staff who may take longer to develop. The system puts tremendous pressure on young academics, but also encourages them to maximise their potential in order to give themselves the best chance of success

It was noticed that in the majority of the universities which we visited, none of the recently hired younger staff had any significant industrial experience (Figure ASM.9). There is some evidence, that they have had summer jobs and ‘interships’ in industry - often with several different companies and types of company. Curiously, the time taken for staff to attract their first industrial grant has substantially shortened in recent years (Figure ASM.8.) There are some individuals and departments who actively encourage industrial experience. A number of senior staff had been recruited from industry with 5-25 years experience. Often these researchers have come from contractions in industrial laboratories. Industry and academia both consider links between them important for the health of the chemical engineering community in general.

We found that whilst a far greater proportion (67%) of UK academics had some industrial experience (average of three years), US staff (21%) with industrial experience had spent longer in industry (four years on average). Industrial funds of UK

Table ASM.1. Comparisons of the details of industrial funding.

staff make up 26% of their total research income, and in the US such funds account for 18% of an academic’s income. So the question arises as to whether industrial experience counts in attracting industrial money?

Figures for UK chemical engineering show that only 54% of academics who currently hold funds from industry have such industrial experience – this figure is only 18% for the US. This means that the third of UK academics who have no industrial experience, are pulling in nearly 50% of the industrial money in chemical engineering research. The US figure is even more stark. Furthermore, only a third of those in the UK who have industrial experience currently hold any funds from industry; the US figure is comparable (31%).

Of those who do hold industrial funds, their length of service in industry is average for all those with industrial experience. Essentially, this means that having industrial experience does not enhance one’s chances of attracting industrial funds, and in fact could be see to be an inhibiting factor (though the reasons for this are uncertain). Industry in the US is highly supportive of academia, and values its work; this is evidenced by the fact that far more US academics receive industrial funding than have industrial experience. Obviously industry is not going to fund work which is of no interest to it, and coupled with the immense variety of new areas which US academic chemical engineers are breaking into, would imply that there has been a major shift in industrial thinking about what the future holds for chemical engineering. This study has perhaps only lifted the lid on this story, and there remains considerable work in unravelling the complete picture.

Clearly, both the US and UK chemical engineering industries funds the work, which it considers to be important regardless of the background of the individual academic. In many senses, this is encouraging, as it can be argued that good ideas show through.

The whole area of technology transfer, and university-industry links is a difficult one, and beyond the scope of this report. Whilst there is a UK programme to support academics in industry for sabbatical periods, we believe that there is merit in bringing industrialists into the university environment on a similar basis.

Teaching is considered by all the staff we met to be very important, and they give it the effort it is due. All staff teach core undergraduate courses, including those without a chemical engineering background. The latter group will usually sit in on the course given by a senior colleague and perhaps take the ‘recitation' session (problems class) for a year before giving the course themselves. The system was not universal, but common. After a few years, in general, there was no difference between those with a chemical engineering background, and others in the core courses taught. Indeed, it was assumed in many places that joining the department meant a commitment to teach any course in the core curriculum. Many of these staff changed the course content to reflect their own interdisciplinary view of science. Specialist electives were treated differently, but generally these courses were offered at the final year and graduate level. The lecturer for both undergraduate and postgraduate level courses was generally rotated after approximately five years.

The normal teaching load for all universities visited was two whole-semester courses per year (1 undergraduate and 1 postgraduate) which means about 90 contact hours per year - research inactive staff may teach more. There are no tutorials, but perhaps three additional office hours per week when staff open their doors to students. Some universities allow academics to buy time out from teaching using grant money. This was not common, but Pittsburgh had a system where the nominal teaching load was two courses per semester, but it was possible to ‘buy out’ of one of these. Nearly everyone did this, so consequently, those without grants taught more. In general, teaching loads varied with the level of research activity.

A strong sense of democracy was prevalent in all departments, with a chairman (in rotation) often being elected. Although the chairmen often have relatively little power, they do decide initial salary, annual increments, and space allocation. Most of the additional responsibility of a departmental Chair is personnel management. Usually, all full professors vote on promotions, with all staff having a major say or vote on academic appointments. Such arrangements were considered important for the development of the department, and have lead to high levels of staff morale. However, it is interesting that some very high quality staff have been attracted to continental Europe for less stressful working conditions. It was found that special awards, named chairs, prizes, and prestige lectures etc. added significantly to individual’s morale - not all full Professors are created equal.