The Department of Chemical Engineering has an illustrious history, sharing in the MIT tradition of excellence and for the provision of national leadership in engineering education throughout this century. Chemical engineering originated at MIT in 1888, when Lewis Norton offered the first integrated curriculum designed to impart a combination of skills, attitudes and attributes. The program was further shaped by Arthur A. Noyes, William H. Walker, and Arthur D. Little. During the early 20th century - Lewis, McAdams, Whitman, Sherwood, Hottel, and Gilliland among others were responsible for defining and unifying concepts and fundamental principles of chemical engineering; in short, for founding a profession.

Its nearly 6,000 living alumni have distinguished themselves through positions of responsibility and leadership in industry, government, and academia. More than 10 percent of its alumni are senior executives of industrial companies; over 10 percent of the nation's teachers of chemical engineering were awarded one or more of their degrees from MIT. Approximately 25 percent of the recipients of major awards presented by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Chemical Society's Murphree Award have been alumni or faculty of MIT. Nine faculty members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and of the 100 or so chemical engineers elected to the National Academy of Engineering, about 20 percent have been alumni or faculty of MIT.

The undergraduate and graduate student population numbers are approximately of the order of 300 and 225, respectively, with about 20% of the graduate students from overseas. MIT do not recruit their own graduates for PhDs although they will allow them to stay on for 1 year to do the Chemical Engineering School Practice.

On an annual basis, the Department awards approximately 40 Master of Science Degrees (of which about 85 percent are obtained through the Practice School program), 30 Doctoral (Ph.D. or Sc.D.) Degrees and 100 undergraduate Degrees. Ph.D.'s take on average 54 months. The drop out rate is 15-20% (students mainly drop out because they decide they would rather ‘work’). The Department funds the first semester for all students. Since all students are funded, this requires raising 40k per year (tuition and stipend - $15,000) for each student, 30% of which comes from overheads, endowments, alumni or industrial donations with the remaining 70% coming from research contracts. In practice a faculty member needs $350K to fund a single student, travel etc. is on top. This is difficult to justify for 2 publications and can only be justified in terms of education.

The UG research project is a serious turn on for students. They get letters of recommendation, paid or academic credit. They can undertake it during a semester or in the summer. Typically they work 6-10 hours per week with a graduate student or post doc. Post docs are generally employed for their specific expertise and not generally for blue skies research. From MIT, after a Ph.D. typically 50 % go to industry and 50% to academia. Having a Ph.D. gives a definite salary advantage in industry. The MIT graduate students were essentially "the best".

• "Students carrying out research in biochemical engineering for example would be expected to take courses in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology, cell physiology, and from industrial microbiology, genetics, molecular biology laboratory, protein lab, biotechnology. Must have sterile technique, gene splicing, protein and nucleic acid analysis. Otherwise stymied from clean thinking."
• "I am much happier with PhD students than with post docs, but 3 year PhD’s are like "technicians" i.e. they have not developed the ability to analyse / interpret data and set up experimental designs. Here grad students are best for testing and developing long term ideas. "
• "Do not throw away the Bioprocess Engineering teaching as there are jobs out there. Bioprocess engineering is the equipment-related side of the work. The trend is to move away from it after decades of chemical engineering development work. There will always be a need to train people to handle the equipment in pharmaceutical companies, carry out fermentations, purification, scale-up and make material for clinical trials."

Usually search in all areas with perhaps some priorities (it is a large department with a wide range of interests). Research committee will decide priority areas with consensus from faculty.

Around $200 000. Some of this money will come from the Department and some from the University. It is possible to take someone who has just finished their PhD and send them off to another University to take up a post doc. position, so that they hit the ground running.

Tenure "makes one push hard all the time"; "need to always look good"; "makes you try to do everything".

Another did not feel the tenure system "pushed" him. He felt that "some view it as only a target, others do what they want to do". He felt people could get hung up on it and that if you got on with the job, there would not be a problem with tenure.

• "The expectation is to be number one in field. Tenure rate is about 2/3 (two out of three). There is a need to publish and to establish own research profile. Meetings / conferences are extremely important in terms of tenure. It is important to present new work/results as soon as possible. "MIT has to do excellent work, and everyone has to know about it". Thus attends approximately 10 meeeting / conferences per year and aims to get 10 journal publications / year."
• In terms of promotion he stressed that at least 8 letters of support were required, detailing impact of research, about one third were put forward by the candidate with the rest being put forward by members and other faculty.
• In term of publications, he did not feel numbers mattered it was establishing an "identity" and having an impact which was important (e.g. one Science publication better than many mediocre ones).
• Poor morale in research in industry due to funding cuts. Academic salaries competitive, although he took a slight salary cut when he joined the faculty. Chemists too pure - regard quantum kinetics as a solved problem. Applied for posts in chemistry departments, who advised him to apply to chemical engineering. Chemical engineers enthusiastic and interested in his approach. Interested in using fundamental research for engineering.

The specific areas are: biochemical engineering, biomedical engineering, catalysis and chemical kinetics, colloid science and separations, energy engineering, environmental engineering, materials, polymers, process systems engineering, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and molecular simulation, transport processes.

The department is active in long term planning i.e. try to anticipate important areas for future research focus (individual faculty maintain control/determine their own research areas). For example the Centre for Bioprocess Engineering did work on downstream processing and cell culture but now the emphasis has shifted to cellular processes and nucleic acid technology. It appears that the changes were driven by a few biochemical engineers, who decided to work in the new field and changed the funding climate by persuasion. Initially they found working in cellular processes hard. Now they lead.

• "Chemical engineering as a whole is changing from petrochemical (plant) process engineering and moving back to technical chemistry / applied methods of chemistry."

Alumni are receptive to new initiatives and effectively sustain the institution by enabling risk taking. The money provided by alumni is ‘money on the margin’ which is very flexible e.g. for graduate fellowships. This allows people to go into new areas, without having to attract govt/industry funds. There are tax incentives.

• Therapeutic proteins using rDNA;
• Biomaterials - tissue engineering, skin - replacements (ulcers, burns)/ cartilage - is the next big area. - key role for chemical engineer is in calculating/deriving the design parameters.
• Drug delivery ("it is an engineering problem to design drugs to enter the human body in the right place and is not just preparation of a chemical"); smart materials for recognition using peptides; quantification of cellular biological processes.
• Genomics: problem of development of high throughput screening using nanolitre volumes. Ligand/receptor models.
• Directed evolution. metabolic engineering, offers possibilities for reactor network models, to be used in cell physiology and microbial physiology. Multiple gene manipulation.

Self assembly of structures, dendrimers etc.

• Most recent appointments have been in "fringe" areas, in particular in the area of understanding structure - function of molecules (chemistry and biology).
• Philosophy – It is wrong to have large Centres. Principle should be to let a thousand flowers bloom.

Funding climate - Some funding is limited to interdisciplinary projects. So far has obtained some funding from Exxon, consultancy and a small grant from DoE.

• Faculty members feel they have to be continually applying for more funds, sometimes at the expense of time on other areas e.g. interfacing with graduate students. There were difficulties in getting funding for basic equipment when it needs upgrading, repairing etc. Hard to get money from agencies / department for this.
• DARPA (ARPA) provides multi-investigator awards for 3 years (extendible to 5) student support on specific projects, e.g. 1-1.5M/yr devoted to sensors. Government does not provide funds for "minor" but necessary causes, but Department can help with competitive awards.
• NIH is seen as increasing source of funds – as their appropriation is increasing by 10% per year as opposed to average 3% of other funding sources). Biotechnology is an enabling technology and not specifically disease related. The problem is that NIH is disease organised. NIGMS (General Medical Sciences) is exception and does basic research but is biotechnology basic research? There have been some problems in accommodating bioengineering within NIH.

The comfort level seems better for senior ranks since they have large grants for several students, whereas junior staff will need many grants to maintain their student numbers. On the other hand if one wanted to change field there is plenty of funding for Junior Faculty but not for Senior Faculty and established groups. Issues such as no knowledge of area cited.

• "From 1984 to today funding process research has become increasingly difficult. Transferred focus to writing books."

Interdisciplinary work stated to be encouraged through NSF and NIH, e.g. the MURI (multi-university research initiative). There would be no possibility of collaboration unless NSF core funding specified the crossing of disciplinary boundaries.

• "Biologists and chemical engineers have a very different culture. Only 5% of biologists will understand the engineering culture and have sympathy with the approach. Collaboration is neither easy nor natural. In biology, research is concentrated in a single area and the aim is to become a specialist. Their experimental systems are set up to reveal knowledge and they want clean data. For chemical engineers the important areas are related to a problem in industry. They tend to be minor players in the development of a field but are valuable because they will tackle anything which they can contribute to. Biologists do not enjoy this type of collaboration. "
• "Chemists and biologists have failed for 25-30 years to establish common courses for example in protein chemistry."
• "Research collaboration may work if each participant is prepared to learn about the others field. In MIT the biology/chemical engineering collaboration has been fruitful."

In the multidisciplinary centre for engineering management most projects are on a single discipline basis. This leads to chemical engineering output and management output but little interdisciplinary output.

• "Bioprocess engineering is not a major research area for chemical engineers. It is hard to fund and there is little respect for publications in this area."

This long-standing programme involves carrying out projects at industrial sites. They are co-ordinated by full-time Faculty Members (who are employed for 2 to 3 years) who work at the industrial site to mentor and support the educational progression of students. Projects are intense and of short-term duration (approximately 1 month) with two to three students per project, with the projects designed to improve/design processes but also with specific educational benefits. Large amounts of exposure to industry helps to make research more relevant and also develops communication skills and team building.

IPR - Inventors get preferential terms for licensing from the university to start a business, but faculty can not be operating officers in companies. In terms of intellectual property, ownership belongs to MIT (profits after expenses of patenting are split 1/3 institute, 1/3 Department/Center, 1/3 inventors). Sometimes students start companies.

The Industrial Liaison Programme brings in funding from various companies e.g. the Ford-MIT alliance. This provides "seed funding" to develop new ideas. The companies do not control the intellectual property from this work - it remains with the University although the Company will be involved in discussing the direction of the research.

Daniel Blankschtein Ph.D., Tel-Aviv, Charlie Cooney (Professor and Executive Officer) Ph.D., MIT, Douglas A. Lauffenburger Ph.D., Minnesota, George Stephanopoulos Ph.D. Florida, Gregory Stephanopoulos Ph.D., Minnesota, William Green PhD Chemistry Berkeley, Paula Hammond Ph.D., MIT., Paul Laibinis , Gregory Rutledge, Bernhardt L. Trout

Jonathan King - Professor of Molecular Biology.

Stan Finkelstein - Sloan School of Management Harvard Medical School, MD 1975