UC Santa Barbara is situated on a beautiful portion of the southern Californian coast near to the Santa Ynez mountains. It is a relatively recent development, the campus having been converted from an US Marines base in 1944. It's relative newness enables it to take a rather more interdisciplinary approach to both research and teaching and it has seven NSF funded Interdisciplinary research centres. There are 900 full time faculty members 16000 undergraduates and 2000 postgraduates. UCSB is considered to be amongst the best in a wide range of disciplines and is ranked as a category 1 research university (Carnegie commission ranking). It is a part of the nine campus University of California system which is widely regarded as the nations premier public system of higher education. Walter Kohn, a UCSB physics professor, was awarded the 1998 Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

The Department has approximately 110 undergraduates. There are 65 graduate students in the M.S. and Ph.D. programs and 20 post-doctorates. Annual research funding for 1993-1994 was $4.8 million.

Santa Barbara is reckoned to be one of the up and coming departments in the US. The department formed a strategic plan whilst under the chairmanship of Sanjay Bannerjee (1980-84) to elevate itself into the top flight. This policy to diversify is now coming to fruition, with a recent series of strong appointments. The plan was developed in conjunction with a supportive and driving Dean, and was developed within the wider context of the needs of the university as a whole. The macro view of the teaching policy of the University of California system was learned from Stanford, and it is at Dean level that all of the important decisions about direction are made. Despite much progress, Santa Barbara and UCLA remain weaker sisters in the UC system. It is claimed that postgraduate student quality is equal to Caltech - possibly because of a sufficiency of excellent students and the beach - which also attracted some of the top faculty.

In the early years of the undergraduate course much of the teaching load is relieved from chemical engineering faculty by joint teaching with other departments. Courses are taught in this way with around 10 staff, which would not be possible in most cases in the UK system. Additionally, administrative loads such as admissions are handled centrally by the faculty at least at the undergraduate level. Good undergraduate students can do research as part of a full research lab for credit/pay or both. Research doesn’t trickle down into undergraduate teaching. Accreditation is believed to slow down the introduction of new areas into the curriculum, but this might be easier with ABET 2000. Current perception that the only flexibility is with options (about 30%).

• '90% of the battle is to get good grad students'
• 'We can have the most impact at grad student level. We can have less impact at undergraduate level because of lack of overall control.'
• '1/2 a staff member spent on grad recruitment and approximately $20k per annum.'

Graduate courses help to 'bridge the gap' between the undergraduate programmes and 'real research'. Graduate students do not like exams, but almost all good ones make it through their qualifier.

The department has tended to hire some very good older faculty in at the full professor level and was helped by being formed as Bell Labs were releasing many staff. Some of the older faculty were hired in non-mainstream chemical engineering areas such as electronics. Leal and Weinberg were then hired from Caltech to boost the chemical engineering visibility.

They wanted to change the chemical engineering paradigm from process to product oriented, which meant a greater emphasis on adding value. They hired faculty to achieve this. Molecular level understanding is now required. Undergraduate teaching has not followed this trend possibly due to accreditation constraints.

Starter packages were in the region of $200k with 2 years of grad student support and summer salary.

All faculty members in last 10 years have achieved tenure. It was remarked that tenure by requiring young faculty to achieve rapid visibility, tended to encourage them to go into newer, unpopulated, areas. This was also encouraged by a perception that NSF grant reviewers and journal referees were not impressed by process oriented research.

Young faculty are treated as regular faculty and democracy is assumed to be a positive influence. Departmental chairman is just that and there is true democracy.

Research areas seem to have a strong materials science bias (c.f. Minnesota). The recruitment of faculty is stated to always to take the best candidate regardless of research field, although there is a prejudice towards the newer product oriented materials/molecular research. It may be that it is difficult to recognise quality in faculty working in more mainstream engineering due to 'cultural differences'. When he was Department Chairman, Banerjee drove the research into product oriented, rather than process oriented directions.

The Department supports two interdisciplinary research centres

 Center for Macromolecular Science and Engineering (MACSE)

 Center for Risk Studies and Safety (CRSS)

In addition it is strong in the areas of electronic materials, and process control.

UCLA and Berkeley have pools of cash (venture capital), but UCSB has not as it sees it's mission as primarily training students.

• "There is perceived tension in chemical engineering world between academia and industry. The top 20 departments do fundamental research, with the rest doing much more applied/traditional stuff. Industry may not necessarily agree that fundamental research done in universities is what should be going on"
• "It can be difficult for chemical engineering science departments such as most of the big names to attract industrial money. Industrial money seemed to come in lumps of $25k to support a student for a year. The number of such grants was diminishing."
• 'NSF does a good job all in all'

Sanjoy Banerjee, Dale Seborg, Eray Aydil, Gary Leal (HoD), Theo Theofanous.