UW News

November 13, 1998

UW professor to lead American Institute of Chemical Engineers

University of Washington Professor Bruce Finlayson has been elected vice president of the 58,000-member American Institute of Chemical Engineers and will take over as president next year. Finlayson’s election was announced in Miami Beach, Fla., today at a business meeting preceding the institute’s annual national conference.

“It is very satisfying to be recognized in this way by my peers since the AIChE is the global leader of the chemical engineering profession,” he says. “One of the initiatives I will push is the green chemistry initiative of the Environmental Protection Agency, which will revolutionize process design by taking a life cycle approach. The organization also is pushing information dissemination via the Internet, and I hope to encourage the use of modern technology when it is more efficient and cheaper.”

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers was founded in 1908 to provide leadership, training and service for the chemical engineering profession, which is responsible for making everything from fat-free potato chips to computer chips. The institute’s members include students, university professors, industry engineers and chief executives of major corporations.

Finlayson, the Rehnberg Professor of Chemical Engineering at UW, is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He has been a member of the board on chemical science and technology of the National Research Council and currently serves on the advisory board of the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society.

Finlayson is nationally recognized for his research on chemical reactor modeling and the flow of polymers as well as his contributions to chemical engineering education and literature. He has been instrumental in developing educational software and new curricula to integrate the use of computers and multimedia into the classroom. Under Finlayson’s leadership as chair (1989-1998), the UW Chemical Engineering Department was ranked among the top 20 programs in the country, received top education ratings from alumni across the university and achieved superior levels of female enrollment (43 percent), undergraduate involvement in research (68 percent) and undergraduate student retention (94 percent) for engineering programs nationwide.

In addition to his professional interests, Finlayson plays the cello and enjoys running and hiking.

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