School of Chemical Engineering Practice

T. Alan Hatton, Ph.D., Ralph Landau Professor and Director of the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Founding Fellow, American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering Member, American Institute of Chemical Engineers, American Chemical Society, International Association of Colloid and Interface Scientists, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Neutron Scattering Society of America (Section 22, Alternative Separation Processes)... 

Mattill. J. (1991). The Flagship The MIT School of Chemical Engineering Practice, 1916-1991. Cambridge, MA David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice, MIT. 

A unique development at MIT was the School of Chemical Engineering Practice, an industry-academia cooperative master s course at a high, practical level it was proposed by Little in the same 1915 report, backed by George Eastman of Eastman Kodak, tried out under Walker s direction, interrupted by U.S. entry into the war, and restarted in 1920. Still an expensive educational scheme, it continues alone to this day. Its closest relatives are the relatively few progeny of another innovation of that era, the coop-... 

W. H. Walker, A Master s Course in Chemical Engineering, J. Ind. Eng. Chem. 8, 746-748 (1916) W. K. Lewis, Effective Cooperation Between the University and the Industry, ibid., 769-770 R. T. Haslam, The School of Chemical Engineering Practice of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, J. Ind. Eng. Chem. 13, 465-468 (1921). On the School vis-a-vis cooperative courses of study and summer employment, see MIT s Henry P. Talbot, The Relation of the Educational Institutions to the Industries, ibid. 12, 943-947 (1920) the issues he raised seem eternal. 

To more firmly establish exposure of students to industrial problems, Walker and his younger colleague, Warren K. Doc Lewis, an MIT chemistry undergraduate with a Ph.D. from Breslau, founded the School of Chemical Engineering Practice in 1916, again with support from Arthur D. Little. Students gained access to the expensive industrial facilities required to relate classroom instruction in unit operations to industrial practices while still retaining faculty supervision. 

He founded the unique School of Chemical Engineering Practice. 

This work is the result of the diligent and conscientious efforts of the members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Chemical Engineering Practice, M. M. Alger, O. K. Chow, M. Z. Khan, and S. M. Senkan (director). Many valuable discussions with R. A. Strehlow, L. H. Harris, and J. W. Larson were involved in the evaluation and interpretation of the results. Research sponsored by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Material Sciences, U.S. Department of Energy, under contract W-7405-eng-26 with the Union Carbide Corp. 

A School of Chemical Engineering Practice where students in an industrial plant, but under the guidance of a professor, carried out chemical engineering tests and studies significant to the operation of the plant. 

Even with such an outstanding nucleus, it is doubtful if chemical engineering at M.I.T. could have attained its position of prestige without the help of an administration, under President MacLaurin, which was most sympathetic to the aims of education and research. President MacLaurin wholeheartedly backed Walker and Lewis and with the aid of Arthur D. Little, was successful in having George Eastman donate 300,000 to establish the first School of Chemical Engineering Practice. 

M.I.T. s School of Chemical Engineering Practice, and as Assistant Director of the Research Laboratory of Apphed Chemistry until 1925. After nine years with the Standard Oil Company of Indiana, he left his position as Associate Director of Research to take the reins as head of the Chemical Engineering Department at M.I.T., a post he held until 1961. 

Eidgennosiche Technische Hochschule in Zurich in 1935. He served in the Chemical Warfare Service in World War I and in 1919 joined Walker, Lewis, McAdams, and Knowland as a consulting engineer. He was appointed to the faculty in 1922 and directed the Boston station of the School of Chemical Engineering Practice from 1923-28. In 1939 he published the first text of its kind. Thermodynamics for Chemical Engineers, revised with Professor H. P. Meissner in 1957. 

Much of the collaboration during this period involved joint development of these new practices in both the academic and the industrial laboratories combined with relatively widespread dissemination, particularly through teaching and textbooks. The Standard Oil refinery in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, also played a key role as an unofficial external laboratory and employer of a great many of the graduates and a number of the faculty at MIT in the school of chemical engineering. 

When you have one woman in a department—which is very often the case in a chemical engineering department, and very often in industry as well—that woman is appointed as the token woman on every single committee. This takes time away from her scholarship, it takes time away from her research, and ultimately—when she comes up for tenure or promotion—the response is, Well, she hasn t performed. But the woman s time had been sapped by the activities of all these committees to which she was appointed. In some schools, department chairs have addressed this problem and put a stop to the practice. Nobody in that department can be put on a committee unless the department chair agrees, and the department chair will shield women and minorities, so that they are not penalized by having to sit on every single committee. 

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