The Chemical Engineering Department consists of 10 faculty (5 in biochemical engineering area) with a total of 50 graduate students (roughly 4 per faculty member) and a very small number of post docs. 20-25% of graduate students are international.

The Department does not take on its own undergraduates as graduate students. The number of applicants and quality of graduate students could be better. For graduate positions, they advertise each year in other Chemical Engineering Departments, and generally get 80-100 applicants (last year only 30), give 25 offers, and take on roughly 12 graduate students. The Department is beginning to get applicants from highly qualified students from Europe (the Department has set up an exchange programme with Europe). Graduate students generally get multiple job offers and get starting salaries of around $60,000 (as opposed to $40,000 for undergraduates). About 20% of chemical engineering graduate students go on to do post docs. Faculty teach 3 courses per year.

In terms of appointing new faculty members, the general policy is to advertise and take candidates with best intellectual ability providing the research area of the best candidate broadly fits into the Department’s areas of research strength. A typical package is 1 PhD student for 4 years, money to start up a lab and summer salary for a number of years

• "I worked 80 hours a week prior to tenure, but now work about 55 hours/week. "

This requires a professor assembling 10 letters of recommendation. This was thought to need at least 12 good publications (this is probably now nearer to 3 / 4 per year).

• "tenure track is accompanied by unreasonable expectations and good people are lost because of the pressure. "

The State of Virginia in trying to set up ties between industry and academia, targeted biotechnology provided 7 years of funding with industry . This has been important for development in the broad area of Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology. At Virginia it was said to be very easy to work across departments, with master students, for example, often working in more than one Department. The problems encountered included competition between Engineering Departments within the University i.e. obstacles at school / university level.

An NSF grant had provided funding for graduate students to work on environmentally benign processes. with a team came from chemical engineering, civil engineering and environmental science as a training programme it brought a matching grant from University A Biophysics Group has been set up which consists of civil engineers, environmental scientists and chemical engineers. This group holds seminars (internal and external speakers) every other week and 4 yearly day retreats to discuss research etc

A biotechnology training programme brought interaction with cell biologists and life scientists. It was felt that at times engineers were simply providing a service to life-scientists (e.g. helping develop purification strategies); however, the situation was sometimes reversed. The Department had so far made no conscious decision to move into molecular biology. Whilst this restricted research areas in which they could apply for funding, there was still plenty of scope for doing solid research (some of which was definitely process related). The interactions between chemical engineers and molecular biologists allowed application for NIH funding, and in addition biochemical engineering funding from NSF remained constant.

Projects included those aimed at preventing bed sores, shock, trauma etc., and development of methods for insulin delivery.

Virginia has seen limitations with state funding not being generous over last 8-10 years (it is becoming more and more of a private rather than public university). In addition as more universities are competing the % of proposals funded is declining. This is in a context of increasing costs of research.

• "the future has to be in government funding as industry has too short a view. This is.easier for biochemical engineering as it is one of NSF’s focus areas."

The Department seems to have excellent industrial links with a variety of companies including Merck. The larger companies tend to have longer term programmes. As a Department, the general policy is to keep away from the shorter consultancy type of projects. There was a general comment that the chemical industry is beginning to get interested in the use of biochemical based processes for bulk chemicals production (e.g. Dow, Bayer) i.e. turning towards plants and fermentations as a potential means of generating a wide range of chemicals, both traditional products and newer products orientated towards health care.

Don Kirwan (Head of Department) , Giorgia Carta, Eric Fernandez, Roseanne Ford, John Gainer.