An overwhelming impression of the sort of research being carried out in US chemical engineering departments is that it has a very substantial component of work which relates to other disciplines. In the UK, much of the work would rarely be found inside a chemical engineering department, and many times we were told that the academics were collaborating with UK scientists rather than UK chemical engineers.

• One department commented that "Everyone hired since 1982 is in the area of applied physics, chemistry, biology, i.e. engineering science. This is not what the UK does".
• There is greater interaction with other departments (e.g. biology, physics, chemistry and materials). This contrasts with Europe, where there is much less interaction between various disciplines. Through contacts with chemistry, new horizons are being opened up. One of the challenges for UK and US chemical engineers is to bridge the gaps between disciplines.
• Often we were told that that they [the US] considered their UK competitors to be in physics and chemistry departments, and that "Contacts with UK are rarely in chem eng."

There are many factors which underpin this major difference, and they relate to all of the other aspects that have been covered in earlier chapters. They include, the post-graduate coursework taken by Ph.D. students, the funding mechanisms available, the practice of taking short post-doctoral positions in a non-chemical engineering department, the different background disciplines of staff, the customs and practice of individual departments, fashions across the country, and opportunities offered by industry.

Interdisciplinary research investigates phenomena using the techniques of different disciplines, or develops new products, or processes using tools, fabrication methods, measurements, or modelling procedures which have been characteristically introduced by one or other discipline. In modern science, there is a large range of powerful tools and techniques. These must be made available to all scientists irrespective of their discipline. It must be assumed that the ability to use a tool is not limited to those of a particular type of degree training. It is also true that the solutions of some problems is facilitated by knowledge of different fields. Again people from different disciplinary backgrounds can acquire knowledge of other fields, and bring these tools back to their ‘home’ discipline.

To work in a field, which would be thought interdisciplinary at present, requires either a team of people with different backgrounds to work on the problem, or a set of versatile individuals. Individuals can acquire most of the specific knowledge necessary, and refer to expert consultants where support on background information is required. Substantial funds are required to support a team approach, so having a centre in which a number of people collaborate on a variety of different projects, facilitates team working without excessive expenditures on single projects. A single investigator who has developed the necessary skills can use the second approach. It would be helpful and efficient if encouragement is given to people willing to follow this course so that they can be encouraged to acquire additional expertise through working on an appropriate project.

In the US, we found both approaches being used; in the UK we have found both approaches were thought to be difficult. The IRCs have not tended to spread a wide interdisciplinary umbrella, and have not assembled very diverse teams. Individuals have reported extreme frustration in having grant proposal referees requesting that they set up collaborations which are really too cumbersome for the projects proposed. In addition, the constraints of the RAE work against scientists collaborating with another discipline which they perceive to be publishing in "low impact factor" journals.

Unless these structural difficulties can be overcome, it will be difficult for the UK researchers to make progress in the new areas at the interface between chemical engineering and other disciplines. There are other difficulties too, which relate to a suspicion of a non chemical engineering background in people wanting to join chemical engineering departments. The more traditional or conservative heads of departments do the discipline few favours if they insist on holding back the development of the profession into the new and expanding areas of industrial importance. A further problem is the limitation of the length of the Ph.D. degree, which can inhibit the development of interdisciplinary skills.

University internal funding mechanisms place barriers to collaboration across departments because there must be substantial time spent in developing relationships and preliminary exploration. This may well be an ‘out-of-pocket’ cost to one participant, and not recoverable within the university cost structures. Only at the point of substantial funding is it recovered. Even then, a model which places a student in one department with supervisors in two different departments, is apparently too difficult for some accounting systems to cope with. The effort involved for an individual in bridging disciplines is substantial. Placing additional hurdles, which are seen at many points, does not encourage this enterprise. Collaboration is possible with large centres, however, it is probably not the most efficient approach.

The UK is not unique in having these barriers; the US had the same problem, but overcame them about 15 years ago. They did it, by and large, by having exceptional individuals who learned the tools from other disciplines and imported them into chemical engineering. Perhaps the climate was easier, perhaps the individuals were exceptional, in any case the pioneers made the current highly interdisciplinary approach possible for the majority. It is probable that the inclusivity and diversity of their funding system made it easier for these exceptional individuals to find the gaps and get the funding process and learning processes underway.

Different disciplines have different cultures, and successful collaboration requires mutual learning. Many considered collaboration to be neither easy, nor natural. Often, pure scientists are concerned with a single area, with the aim to become a specialist. Chemical engineers will tackle anything which they can contribute to, and often the important areas are related to a problem in industry. There is strong anecdotal evidence that the strategies and policies of the NSF have driven the chemical engineering community towards more collaborative ventures. This may have been via the push towards pure science at the boundaries of traditional subjects, where chemical engineers found that they had to collaborate in order to be successful. Another important factor for fruitful collaboration is for each party to contribute to learning the other’s field. Further collaboration is either cemented of generated by attending conferences. On average, a US academic attends five to ten conferences and specialist meetings per year.

Chemical engineers brought their own approach to these joint problems and projects. For example, biologists want to understand the question, their experimental systems are set up to reveal knowledge, and they want clean data:

A particular strength of many of the chemical engineering departments which we visited is the naturally multidisciplinary staff (physicists, chemists and biologists). However, encouragement of individuals is not the only mechanism in the US to promote multidisciplinary work. There are centres at many universities (and departments) for encouraging collaborative work. The centres themselves define project areas which require a multidisciplinary approach. But this is not the whole of the story, for we have seen evidence that even these approaches do not yield the highest levels of teamwork considered essential for some projects. The Department of Energy in particular, will first look towards the national laboratories when commissioning a highly multidisciplinary project. The national labs in their natural structure and management are said to work best of all. A former director of a national lab attributed this to, amongst other things, the appraisal system which rewarded the team, group, or department, rather than individuals. An important philosophical note about centres is that the US now considers that… "

In the past, the NIH was thought to be hostile towards collaboration with engineers (except for instrumentation and mechanics), because their organisation groups applications of basic science by disease. The National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) includes basic research in its remit did not easily cater for biotechnology, since it was not considered to be basic research. Biotechnology is an ‘enabling technology’, and not specifically disease-related, so some attempted to set up a Bioengineering Institute. However, others did not like this approach as it had a feel of ‘affirmative action’ about it. Now NIGMS is very open to collaborative work, and has training programmes in biotechnology which require connections between chemical engineering and biology. In addition collaboration is possible with many of the other Institutes.

In the US they take ten or so one-semester courses during their Ph.D. degree. Only four to five of these are core chemical engineering courses and for the rest there is agreement between the adviser and the student about which other courses should be taken. If the work is going to involve significant scientific input beyond chemical engineering then appropriate postgraduate science courses will be taken. Sometimes undergraduate courses are necessary to gain the understanding required to take the advanced science courses. Such courses may not always count towards the ten for the Ph.D. programme but they will nevertheless be taken. At undergraduate level, a student will sometimes take a minor in another discipline, which will involve substantial coursework in that field.

The coursework will be supplemented by experimental training in techniques appropriate to the other discipline. It is regarded as essential that these techniques be imported into the chemical engineering laboratories, and well understood before, they can be used effectively in solving problems. Students doing research in biochemical engineering for example would be expected to take courses in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, cell physiology, microbiology, genetics, protein chemistry, and biotechnology.

It is common to find many different ‘home’ disciplines in a chemical engineering department. Those staff with non chemical engineering backgrounds will naturally continue their research using the knowledge gathered when studying their earlier discipline(s). They may well also take on students with non chemical engineering backgrounds. Typically such students would be located in the most relevant department, to avoid them having to take all the chemical engineering core courses, though they will inevitably be required to take some chemical engineering courses.

In the UK, our study showed that there is now a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds for staff chemical engineering departments. In the UK, about 25% had Ph.Ds from departments besides chemical engineering, compared to 34% in the USA. More significant was that those non-chemical engineers in UK departments had usually only switched from their first discipline on appointment as staff. Those in the USA tended to move around much earlier. In the USA a postdoc is now almost universal for new academics, and predominantly it will have been in a discipline different from the home one (to fill their ‘toolbox’ with new ideas and techniques). Whereas in the UK, many will do a postdoc, most often in the same type of department as their Ph.D, and in many cases in the same institution. The majority of new appointees in the US will have made an early switch of discipline. In fact, one department said that

The responses to the UK questionnaire indicated a difficulty in progressing research which incorporates new scientific knowledge into chemical engineering research. However, it is very encouraging that there are UK people who are trying to break into truly multidisciplinary areas.

Time and again we were told of the need for there to be intellectual excitement (not just challenge) to attract the best young people into chemical engineering. The US has interpreted this as needing to break into areas started by pure science, or to generate whole new areas of research themselves – both routes are naturally multidisciplinary.

Of new areas - Therapeutic proteins using rDNA; Biomaterials (tissue engineering, skin) - replacements (ulcers, burns, cartilage) are examples of what the US considers to be the next big areas. The key rôle for chemical engineering is in getting the design parameters worked out in these areas. Another example is drug delivery - this is an engineering problem, design to enter the human body in the right place, and not just the preparation of the chemical dose. Cytosine activity depends on rates, and not just on concentrations – again, this is a problem natural to chemical engineers. As are the problems of development of high throughput screening using nanolitre volumes for genomics. In a global sense the chemical engineering contribution will be minor, but there is an important perspective given by their approach. Molecular biology is seen as an important new area because there are high impact problems to solve which need chemical engineering and biology expertise. In addition, the NIH has been increasing its funds available in this area (increasing by 10% per year, as opposed to average 3% of other funding sources) which indicates that leadership from funding bodies is both important and influential. It should be remembered that the NSF in particular, has rotating programme managers on sabbatical from academia – this is clearly an important factor