Session chair: Thomas R. Hanley, Dean, Speed Scientific School, Univ. of Louisville
Facilitator: Sue Fratkin, SURA
Participants: Golden Richard, Ken Bishop, Perla Balbuena, Steve Duke, Thanasis Papathanasiou, Randall Bryce, Manolis Tomadakis, Ram Gupta, Greg Thoma, Robert Griffin, Kei Koizumi, Alvin Lim, Ken Bishop, Vijay John (presenter) (Not all the participants were present for all three sessions)
First Session
The session began by defining the questions and topics the participants wanted to cover:
Each participant gave a brief description of his/her research interests, which spanned a wide range of topics:
The group also made a list of research equipment that may be useful, and could be a basis for collaboration:
Dr. Hanley gave a brief presentation on how he sees the chemical engineering field, including a history of human resource needs in the field over the past few decades. He outlined the various influences on supply and demand in the profession, including the U.S. government, international competition, and competition for engineering services.
Dr. Vijay John, on detail to the National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Engineering, discussed the grant process for his Division of Chemical and Transport Systems, which is the lead supporter of chemical engineering in NSF. He explained the different types of grants and offered advice on how young investigators could improve their chances of getting a grant.
Second Session
The session began with the ‘votes’ on research areas. There were two votes: one on personal research interest, one on which topics may be of interest to SURA colleagues, using the list of topics generated the day before (above). The votes were not conclusive, and tended to be evenly distributed.
There was some discussion on equipment. The consensus was that the list was adequate, and that the focus should be on networking computational resources, not necessarily instruments.
Chemical engineering has not had as much use so far as a discipline for high-performance computing. One question was, "Is the lack of a network adversely affecting research?" The answers were generally, NO. One participant said that chemical engineers generally only need processing power, which may not be available on site, but that off-site instruments or data sets generally were not needed. Even with processing power, resources have not been a problem, although in five years or so they might be.
Dr. Hanley summarized by stating that the field is on the verge of seeing a need for networking, but not yet, and that even stating that there is an emerging need may be an overstatement. The greatest need seen by the participants for these new technologies is in communication with colleagues, and perhaps education, not research or computation. Chemical engineering, with its tradition of individual researchers and relatively little collaboration, is fertile ground for collaboration, but little perceived need for it.
Some of the participants talked of their collaborations. One could not think of any multi-campus collaborations he had been part of. One collaborates with a colleague in Minnesota, using back and forth e-mails. Collaborative software may be useful, he said.
A computer scientist stated that his profession needs to create something that people can use, and let people such as chemical engineers know which problems could benefit from new solutions. The NCSA article in the ACM issue (p 80) offers one model, but it did not seem to have relevance to the participants. There was some regret that the people involved in the NCSA Chemical Engineering team were not at the conference to talk about how they saw the new networking technologies and chemical engineering working together.
Third Session
After discussion, two lists were created as a synthesis of the previous two sessions. One was labeled "Research Collaborations" (areas for possible collaboration):
"Research Equipment":
It was agreed that these areas may be potential collaborations, but the field and the participants are not ready yet for collaboration. A follow-up meeting with a larger group of chemical engineers may be needed (at this point, only 6 chemical engineers were left in the room). Some opportunities for follow up would be: South East chemical engineering department heads, who gather annually in summer and who may be interested in what happened at the conference; Computing Applications group in chemical engineering (?).
- Kei Koizumi, AAAS
Return to Chemical Engineering section of Workshop agenda