The mission of Purdue University includes support for the state of Indiana. This includes the development of new courses on video/television; providing help at conferences; and assisting small local companies by effectively providing free technical consultancy.

The origins of chemical engineering education can be traced almost exclusively to the first half of the 19th Century in Germany. During that period ground-breaking chemists such as Justus von Liebig, August Kekulé, August von Hoffman, Robert Bunsen and others established three major universities - University of Heidelberg, University of Göttingen and University of Giessen. These chemical laboratories have since nurtured many generations of theoretical and applied chemists.

George E. Davis gave the first chemical engineering course at the University of Manchester in 1887 in the form of twelve lectures covering various aspects of industrial chemical practice. At Purdue University, which had been established as a land-grant university in 1874, the first chemical engineering course was offered in 1902. Only four years after the introduction of the chemical engineering curriculum there were 79 undergraduate students enrolled on the chemical engineering program. Thus, in 1911 President Stone, Dean Charles Benjamin and Professor Evans sought to establish an independent School of Chemical Engineering. A graduate program was established in 1916. Purdue is one of the University’s in the USA where Process Systems Engineering research remains strong.

At Purdue, a distinction is made between engineers and scientists. Scientists study natural systems whilst chemical engineers are concerned with artificial, man-made systems. They require to carry out a synthesis of different areas. Process Systems Engineering (PSE) is perceived to be core to chemical engineering. An engineered system is designed to meet objectives. Engineers create artificial structures and transform them.

There were some strong feeling on teaching quality: to be a good teacher you need to give high ("easy") grades and solutions to homework problems. Good teaching is encouraged through peers who are recognised for their teaching achievements. There is a general perception that young faculty in smaller departments have a higher teaching load, and little time for research than the more established members. He does not feel that there is serious competition among young people, just competition overall

This programme encourages the development of interdisciplinary engineering through new UG engineering curricula, e.g. cognitive engineering, theatre engineering, architectural engineering, biomedical engineering. The ideas for the specific programmes come from the UG students. An Interdisciplinary Engineering Council (consisting of a Professor from each school) reviews student plans for a course. Courses are assembled from existing curriculum; BSc and BEng Degrees are awarded. The scheme was set-up in 1969 with the key objective of increasing UG numbers; namely to retain people in engineering after the first (freshman) year of study. Students are attracted by the flexibility of this approach.

Highly motivated UG's work in the programme and little publicity of IEP (other than in high-school) required. University administrators quite supportive of programme, particularly with spin-off courses, as these can attract more students to Purdue, and thus more money.

• "It’s a pleasure to work with these students and I didn't want to play a research fund raising game anymore".

The department receives approximately 800 applicants to study for PhD’s. Applications come from a large international pool. International students are generally considered to be better at maths than home students. The students have to study 13 post graduate courses, 5 have to be in the core area. Up to 5 courses may be completely outside Chemical Engineering such as in Biomedical area. The largest research group has currently 26 post-graduate students, with very few post docs. The rest of the research groups in the Department tend to have 5-7 post graduates.

• Better funding opportunities and start-up package and being able to apply work to industrial applications. He selected Purdue because of the potentially wide faculty interactions. "People interact because they like each other". However, in his research area, he feels that it is easier to get funding on his own rather than from a joint proposal, i.e. "to keep staff costs down".
• "I cannot handle idle time, work is a pleasure, in the summer paid himself."
• Became too comfy, need new motivation, new environment to learn and grow. Reason for move to Purdue 1998. University premier engineering group. Systems group well known.
• Work carried out attracted the attention of persons of Purdue, who made an offer he could not refuse in 1988. Subsequently built up group in process systems engineering with 4 faculty and a visiting Professor. One of the largest systems groups in the USA. The other two main groups are CMU and University of Massachusetts. Other Universities have a few key personnel in the area but not large groups e.g. MIT.

Associate Professors - start-up packages include the opportunity to move equipment, for example, Purdue paid the faculty’s member previous University for equipment and its transfer to Purdue. Typical start-up package includes £100K (2 PhD students, 1 summer salary, cash etc.). At Purdue, a student costs - $26K (total). Another said that start-up money was substantial . He never touched but retained it. The department did not reclaim even though he had sufficient funding from NSF, NIH, industry.

The large start up packages can put immense pressure on new faculty to produce results; many young faculty do not have the experience to manage such packages and associated research groups. Concern was expressed regarding how new faculty define new research projects. Senior faculty do try to help/advise younger faculty.

Teaching load is 60 - 70 hrs contact a year. Wide range of Committees (computer, graduate recruitment, faculty, etc.). Young faculty choose their own mentor.

• Teaching is an important consideration for tenure; need to be at least mediocre, will not get tenure if poor at teaching. There are informal mechanisms for helping new faculty with teaching e.g. talks at ACS, AIChemE and on campus. There are rewards for teaching/ developing new courses etc. in the form of University awards (through nomination by Head of Department).
• A mentoring programme is used to bring on new faculty and provide them with feedback. Tenure was considered a pressure but not a problem. Support for young faculty in the Department is good. He has never heard quoted "never heard that you need to do this to get tenure". Teaching and administrative work is distributed equally, i.e. do not unload work on young faculty.
• Believes that to attain tenure his performance will be essentially assessed on the number of publications, number of research students and research income.
• New faculty sometimes experience problems in terms of getting good graduate students; the best students sometimes prefer to work with established faculty.
• Feels that demands on young faculty are harder now but the criteria to succeed are the same - strong research group, publication of papers (quality and reasonable quantity)
• Awareness of some bullying of tenure-track faculty in other departments - "treat us like dirt, and expect us to go through this for the first 5,6,7,8 years, and if we survive that, then we can treat the new people like dirt". "knows" of these problems elsewhere.

They are trying to work in areas of new technology but also have a considerable amount of on-going research in the area of process systems engineering.

• "Believe that research is tending towards either systems or molecular ideas, but UG's taught process engineering. Believe that over specialisation (a narrow view) is not good for application, which is why the broad view of Chemical Engineers gives them an advantage over Chemists."
• "General research perspective - Fewer people now working on process engineering and systems research, more concerned with applied science; however, they both felt it was important to keep research in all three areas going. Again they both felt that in terms of future employment it was important to ensure that graduate students have breadth (industrialists not looking for NMR specialists, for example). The broadness of the Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Program allows students to tackle a broad range of PhD research topics. At undergraduate level there is a much clearer distinction between chemistry and chemical engineering; the two come closer together at graduate level."
• "Application of work is directed through funding opportunities: e.g. DOE, NASA."
• "Exciting areas in model based predictive control (MBPC). In the past, the focus was on large continuous processes, e.g. petrochmical plants. Now the focus has shifted to batch systems, advanced computer technology, chemical process (non-linear development)."

Formed a Consortia, close industrial contacts, define research area - computer science, maths, biology (protein folding, energy minimisation, lattice approximation, protein design - combinatorial problem, gene design)."

• Industrial Research - more responsive, drives, motivates the research, win/win situation, cheap. Exposure to problems, more challenges and fun i.e. extremely challenging problems defined by industry. Very healthy for engineers"
• "Biochemical Research Area Progressing - An important area of research is product formulation and design - developing techniques to reduce development time to develop new drugs, polymers, formulation of paints, fuel additives, etc. Twenty years ago such work was not defined as chemical engineering".

Chancellor David Ward's "cluster hiring" initiative, announced last November, was met enthusiastically by faculty, who developed 95 separate proposals that challenged the traditional boundaries of departments. The nanophase inorganic materials research proposal was one of five that were approved from that group. There is a spirit of Collaboration within the university that was remarked on by several faculty. Collaboration is thought to be easier at Purdue due to the culture. The funding situation has "forced people to interact". One has links with biologists within and outside Purdue. He also has some interaction with Dupont on "Cybernetic models" General trend is a move to multi-disciplinarity - driven by funding

Direct industrial contacts can be made through consultancy work.

• "area of research is nanoelectronics, with collaborators in Norway, Denmark and Japan made through professional meetings; collaborations involve skills exchange. I know researchers in nanotechnology in both US and UK, but mainly from Physics and Electrical Engineering Departments: not many Chemical Engineers in this area."
• "no competitors, work on different problems, if work in same area then initiate collaboration. "
• "Strong emphasis on collaboration - physics (chemical engineering); Chemical engineering (physics)"
• "Takes more time to collaborate "

It was noted that entrepreneurship can take away from fundamental work such as teaching, research if everyone is entrepreneurial. Now the University is becoming too like Industry. Faculty expected to be businessmen as opposed to academics. Encouragement to look at what you are doing and if worthwhile then commercialise it. In order to keep in perspective prioritising is essential. As the power of the Administration increasing and since it can bring greater financial benefits to University than a good paper then it is encouraged.

Venkat Venkatasubramanian, Jennifer Sinclair, Joe Pekney, Jay Lee, David P. Kessler, Nicholas Peppas, Doraiswami Ramkrishna, Osman Basaran, Jochen Lauterbach, Phillip Wankat, Ronald Andres.