What's the catalyst for a career in chemical engineering? Well, it depends.
William Conger recalls the chemical engineer that rented a room in his
family home while he was growing up in Kentucky. Conger spoke with the engineer
in the evenings over the kitchen table. He was further inspired by his high
school chemistry teacher.
Christine Tomacci was attracted to engineering while growing up in California.
"My father is an engineer and it just seemed that a lot of my girlfriends'
fathers were engineers," she recalls. "I helped my father build a deck on
our home and I was always interested in math and the sciences. I've always
liked to know how things worked."
And Keeran Srinivasan has been a "science nut" from a very young age. "It
was a toss-up between physics and chemistry, and I chose chemistry because
of the color."
Heather Sheardown didn't have these early influences, however. "It was
a fluke, really. There's no one in my immediate family with an engineering
background, so I wasn't really even aware of the whole engineering profession
until late high school. I had actually wanted to go into medicine, but I found
that I much preferred math and chemistry and even physics to biology."
Conger is now the chairman of Virginia Tech's chemical engineering department.
In this role, he has been able to share his knowledge with others. He recalls
one student from the University of Kentucky. The student became the only chemical
engineer ever to receive the prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award. The award
is presented annually by the National Science Foundation to an outstanding
scientist under the age of 35.
Before he turned to teaching, Conger worked on a project that involved
the recovery of oil from so-called depleted oilfields. While a faculty member
at the University of Kentucky, he researched the use of alternative fuels.
Conger earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering from the University
of Louisville and his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tomacci holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering, but she works
on a team with chemical engineers. She's involved in the design of systems
and the delivery of industrial gases to industries.
Srinivasan is a research scientist who is keenly interested in the future
of chemical engineering. "The discipline is morphing rapidly and, to some
extent, losing its identity in a melting pot of interrelated, interdependent
research activity like material science, metallurgy and environmental engineering.
Some of these fields feed off of chemical engineering."
A practicing chemical engineer should do more than one task, he adds. "A
lot of chemical engineers are working in the area of biomedical engineering,
designing and building artificial skins, synthetic organs and biosensors.
The key is, we should clone ourselves to do many things. It's this [large
number] of skills that is at once the challenge and charm of chemical engineering."
A desire to get the broadest knowledge of science led Manolis Tomadakis
-- assistant professor of chemical engineering at the Florida Institute of
Technology -- to the profession. The university is located near the site of
the Kennedy Space Center.
"I've never regretted my decision," he says. "I thoroughly enjoy everything
I do. My research project for my doctorate concerned fiber-enforced composites,
which basically tests and simulates molecular reaction and their movements."
Composites of this nature range from high-tech implementations like tile
on the space shuttle to basic uses like insulation for buildings.
Sheardown is now an assistant professor with a university's department
of chemical engineering. She has fond memories of her studies.
"Graduate studies were quite rigorous in a different way than undergraduate
studies. But being a post-doctoral fellow was truly interesting, stimulating
and fun. I'm sure that it was partly the people that I was working
with, since I'm sure that they will be my friends for life."
She enjoyed the atmosphere of those times.
"I was working...for a researcher who had enough money to pay for the research
and enough foresight to give the researchers the trust to do the experiments.
Everyone worked together and when a problem arose or a result didn't make
sense, there was always someone who had some sort of insight into what it
might be."