Close collaboration

It’s not unusual for engineering departments to collaborate with companies, but the UD Department of Chemical Engineering and Merck have raised university-industry collaboration to new heights.

And, alumni have played a major role in the department’s interactions with the international pharmaceutical company, contributing to the relationship as well as benefiting from it.

According to Mark Barteau, chairperson and Robert L. Pigford Chair of Chemical Engineering, the collaboration spans close to two decades and has progressed to the point where Merck now is the largest employer of the department’s graduates.

“There are several paths,” Barteau says. “Some of our undergraduates have gone directly to Merck and established careers, while others have gone on to graduate school and then accepted positions with the company. We also have Merck employees here working on doctoral degrees.”

The long-term relationship between the department and Merck has many facets, including fellowships, funding to student organizations, scholarships, research grants, gifts to support undergraduate research, student tours of Merck plants and lecture exchanges. The company also has a representative on the department’s Advisory Council.
In addition, faculty and senior graduate students present posters at an annual research symposium. “Merck is very good at that,” Abraham Lenhoff, Gore Professor of Chemical Engineering, says. “They want to know who the students are, and they follow through with them, offering them internships and, later, full-time jobs.”

John Markels, EG ’86, vice president of pharmaceutical technology and engineering at Merck, says he remembers being recruited by Mike King, EG ’81PhD, almost 20 years ago into the company’s Manufacturing Division. He later took King’s place as team captain for recruiting and had the opportunity to bring more College of Engineering alumni into the company.

“It’s amazing how many people in the Manufacturing Division have come from UD,” he says, “and they’ve done very well. In fact, two of our senior vice presidents are from Delaware. Merck management is highly populated by UD grads; they make great technical leaders.”

Markels says the University’s chemical engineering program has been identified as a key for Merck’s recruiting activities, which gives the company a competitive advantage in hiring. “Recruiting is best done over time with long-term relationships,” he says. “Our new hires go back to their alma mater and tell current students how good it is here. It benefits everyone. We get strong engineering talent, and UD grads get good jobs. I get a tremendous charge out of bringing new talent into the company.”

In 2001, Annette Orella took over Markels’ role at Merck as liaison with the chemical engineering department.

“I was thrilled at the opportunity because of the success that Delaware chemical engineering graduates have had at Merck,” she says. “My first surprise was the number of chemical engineering alumni within the Merck community and the number of different areas in which they were working.”
Orella points to University alumni in research, including bioprocess, pharmaceutical and chemical; in technical operations, working with new product introduction and process improvement; in process engineering, designing new equipment; in environmental support; and in operations. “Clearly, the ability for chemical engineers to make an impact in many different areas was demonstrated here,” she says.

The company also is supportive of the continuing education of its own employees, Barteau says. The Merck Fellowship, for example, enables select employees with bachelor’s degrees to complete advanced degrees while still earning 75 percent of their full-time pay. “Many of them go to school part time, and our Engineering Outreach Program has really helped with our ability to accommodate their academic needs,” Barteau says.

According to Assistant Dean Kathy Werrell, who coordinates the outreach program, many Merck employees begin their graduate studies on a part-time basis, primarily through distance courses, and then take advantage of the Merck Fellowship to come to campus full time to complete the research and dissertation components of their education. In addition to facilitating part-time graduate studies, the program has worked with chemical engineering faculty to bring noncredit short courses to a Merck corporate site exclusively for employees.

The relationship between Merck and UD has weathered two decades in which tremendous change has occurred in science and technology, Lenhoff says.
“We’re seeing a real bifurcation within the pharmaceutical industry concerning the perception of chemical engineers,” he says. “Merck can’t seem to get enough of them, while other companies are gravitating toward chemists and biochemists as the area of biotechnology continues to grow. The shift of chemical engineering to the bio area is reflected in employment practices, but Merck keeps coming to us for students. We see this as validation of our approach to education in this area.”
The chemical engineering department has added a minor in biochemical engineering, which is aimed at providing students with the opportunity to study advances in biochemistry and the biological sciences, integrated with engineering analysis.

“We believe that our core curriculum in chemical engineering still provides the best tools for dealing with bio-related problems,” Barteau says, “but we’re now complementing that core with knowledge about biological and biochemical topics.”

Close relationships with industry have an additional advantage of enabling academic departments to stay in touch with the real world in terms of both research directions and curricula, Lenhoff says.

“Activities like plant visits, internships and lectures by guest speakers from Merck provide our students with good exposure to what chemical engineers actually do,” he says.

—Diane Kukich, AS ’73, ’84M