Vol. 19, No. 27

April 13, 2000

A conversation with Stanley I. Sandler

Stanley I. Sandler was recently appointed to the Henry Belin du Pont Chair in the premier Department of Chemical Engineering. This is the first endowed chair in the College of Engineering. Sandler has been the Henry Belin du Pont Professor in the department since 1982, and has, for eight years, directed the Center for Molecular and Engineering Thermodynamics. He has been professor of chemistry and biochemistry since 1993. What inspired you to get into chemical engineering? Did you play with chemistry sets at a young age, or did you choose the field when you were older? As a youngster, I very much enjoyed chemistry and chemical-related phenomena and trying to understand why the world was as it is. Like so many children of my era, I had a chemistry set of a type that is no longer available. I enjoyed mixing chemicals to make colors change, to make smoke or odd odors, and later to make rocket propellants. However, in high school, I found my interest had changed from laboratory work and possibly being a research chemist, to examining larger processes and projects; things that might have a more immediate, positive effect on society so I took up engineering. While in graduate school, I made another career-path change, and decided to remain in academia. What was the path that led you to the University of Delaware? I grew up in New York City and went to City College of New York because my family could not afford college tuition. I received the undergraduate degree in 1962, and then went to the University of Minnesota, since it had the highest ranked chemical engineering program in the country. After completing the Ph.D. in 1966, I was awarded a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship for study at the Institute for Molecular Physics at the University of Maryland. While there, a friend, who was then in the department here, invited me to present a seminar on my research. Shortly after, I was offered a faculty position and started at Delaware in 1967. Have any members of your family also gone into chemical engineering? No. However, between my wife, Judith, and our three children, our family has earned six degrees at the University of Delaware in six different colleges (under the old college system). Our daughter is a vice president at MBNA. Our oldest son has physical education and nursing degrees, and is manager of Cardiac Services at the Heart Institute in Greenville, S.C. Our youngest son has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, and works for a startup company in the area. Have you been a visiting professor or lectured abroad during your career? I have been a visiting professor at Imperial College (London), Technical University of Berlin, University of Queensland (Australia), University of California-Berkeley, and University of the South (Argentina). I have given numerous lectures in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. What are your primary areas of research? My main areas of research are thermodynamics and separations. Whenever a chemical or pharmaceutical is produced, there are many impurities, including the products of side reactions and unreacted components. Part of my research deals with the science of purification processes. In fact, purifications usually amount to 70 percent or more of the cost and operation of a chemical process. However, I also have other interests, including understanding the fate of a chemical when it is released into the environment; that is how much of it appears in the air, water, soil and even our bodies. Computational chemistry, that is being able to predict the properties of a molecule knowing only its structure, is another of my research activities. In what ways do you plan to use the chair endowment money? The monies will be used to support my teaching and research, not my salary, and will be used in a number of ways. First, my research group has a continuing need for analytical and computer equipment. We are major computer users, and such equipment rapidly becomes out of date. While I generally try to get federal grants for such purchases, there are always unmet needs. A second use of the funds will be to provide support for additional undergraduate and graduate students working with me on research. Also, though most of my research is supported by governmental and industrial grants, because of the proposal writing and peer review stages, there is a very long delay between when one has an exciting new idea and funds can be obtained to initiate the research. The chair monies provide the opportunity to pursue ideas immediately. In fact, by providing the seed money for new research ideas, I hope to be able to leverage the endowment funds to obtain bigger research grants. I understand you've done important work for the government, too. What are some of the projects? Like most other senior academics, I have served on various panels and committees. Currently, I am on a committee that reports to the U. S. Army and the Congress on how we are to dispose of our armed and assembled chemical weapons to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention. These weapons contain toxic chemical warfare agents and high-energy explosives and are located at Army depots around the country. I have had to go into bunkers containing large numbers of rockets filled with Sarin, propellants and various explosives wearing a respirator and carrying an auto-inject antidote pack in the morning, and then sit in a public forum in the evening listening to citizens' concerns or making presentations on disposal technologies. Does chemical engineering education still focus mainly on building chemical processing plants, or is the discipline changing? When I was a student, the education was largely based on the petroleum industry and large quantity commodity chemicals, and much of the design was done with a slide rule. Both have changed. Design is now largely done with large computer programs that require less time and, therefore, fewer engineers. Also, a large fraction of our graduates now go to work in nontraditional areas such as pharmaceuticals, computer chip manufacturing, the electronics industry, specialty chemicals, consulting, environmental reclamation and even to work on Wall Street. This is in addition to those who go on to medical, law and dental school. So now we are training students for a greater variety of careers and to deal with changes throughout their career. With that in mind, what are some of the challenges facing chemical engineering educators? As educators, we need to provide a strong core engineering education that includes the mathematical, scientific and computational abilities necessary to understand complex, highly integrated processes. We must also help the student understand how to function with uncertainty and incomplete knowledge, since an engineer never has all the information needed to design a process. Also, the student must learn how to function as a professional, subject to environmental, societal and cultural constraints. Finally, we must also provide flexibility in the educational program for the student to learn how to think independently, to become a cultured graduate of our University and to be able to pursue their own professional and nonprofessional interests in the international arena. Our challenge is to accomplish all these things. Can we assume when students graduate that they are fully prepared for the future? Absolutely not. Chemical engineering is a very broad and dynamic profession, and we can teach only the basics at the University. Part of our job as educators is to impress on students that for them to have a successful career they have be responsible for their own lifelong learning, and always be prepared to reinvent themselves when necessary. While they may no longer be in a classroom after graduation, their education as a professional had better continue. –Phil Milford