What is the Center for Chemical Engineering Practice?

The Center for Chemical Engineering Practice (CCEP) was started to try to help fill the gap between the teaching of Chemical Engineering at most universities and the needs of practicing chemical engineers and their employers for practical knowledge and skills. It is a cooperative, non-profit effort to gather together in one place a collection of educational materials to facilitate the teaching of ChE Practice both within and outside of universities. There exists a large and growing distance between engineering professors who necessarily focus on their scientific research and the practicing engineers who are the product of their undergraduate programs. The CCEP tries to bridge that gap through making it easier for both academics and experienced professionals who come later to teaching to impart useful and necessary skills and knowledge to engineers in training. The result is intended to be more capable and confident young engineers and higher standards of engineering practice through enhanced safety, more fruitful investment, and greater profitability within the process industries.

Tom Meadowcroft started this effort and contributed the original material, but for it to succeed, there must be contributions from many others. Please click Contact to get in touch with the editors of this website if you would like to contribute new material, or edit, improve, or append some of the existing material.

Tom Meadowcroft is a Sr. Lecturer in Chemical Engineering at Rowan University, in Glassboro, New Jersey, USA. Raised in Canada, he earned his bachelors degree at the University of Toronto and his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also earned at Masters of Chemical Engineering Practice at the M.I.T. Practice School, where he later spent 2 years as an on-site instructor. Leaving academia, Tom went on to spend 24 years working as a Process Control specialist, a Process Engineer, and a Process Designer. He started teaching chemical engineers in 2016 as an adjunct, and took a full time teaching position in 2018 at Rowan, where he has developed courses in Process Safety, Process Control Design and Practice, as well as modules for teaching students to understand and create detailed designs at the P&ID level.

Mission

The Center for Chemical Engineering Practice (CCEP) was founded to encourage the teaching of the chemical engineering practice inside and outside of academia. It is to be a community of academics and professionals dedicated to improving the education of chemical engineers, and the practice of chemical engineering.

University training of chemical engineers often falls short in delivering graduates with the necessary skills to effectively practice their profession, leaving graduates to complete their education through ad hoc learning in the workplace. This shortfall leads to poor engineering practice, often never corrected. An incomplete education lowers the productivity of graduates and negatively impacts the performance of the process industries with regards to safety, quality, profitability, and the environment.
There are general principles of chemical engineering practice distinct from engineering science which can and should be taught to complete the training of a chemical engineer. These principles of practice generally stress synthesis (design) and the process of decision-making over analysis (modelling of systems).
University engineering faculty, many of whom have little or no experience of engineering practice, generally lack the knowledge and confidence to teach engineering practice. To better teach engineering practice, academics must be provided with principles to teach and examples to use.
Professionals with the requisite knowledge and experience of engineering practice generally lack the platform, the teaching skills, and the teaching materials to be effective educators. Professionals must be provided with teaching materials to enhance their ability to effectively translate their practical knowledge and experience into useful and productive teaching, and to encourage them to take up teaching either at a university, in their workplace, or online.
The knowledge necessary to teach chemical engineering practice exists. That knowledge must be structured, presented clearly by capable educators, and made a part of a chemical engineer’s professional education either as part of their original degree, or soon after. The Center for Chemical Engineering Practice is a forum to facilitate that education.

Better Education in Chemical Engineering Practice

It’s easy to carp about the deficiencies of Chemical Engineering education, but difficult to make changes. On most campuses, Chemical Engineering has the longest list of required courses and the least flexibility of any undergraduate degree. How should we make room for more ChE Practice education, and who is going to teach it?

1. Senior curricula should be adjusted to allow the 90% of students (at most schools) who plan to practice engineering after graduation to take courses that stress engineering practice rather than preparation for graduate school. Too many senior curricula, in particular the technical electives, are organized around the research interests of tenure-track professors rather than the needs of their students. The primary purpose of a professional degree is not to prepare for graduate school. Students headed to a career in industry will choose courses in engineering practice if they are offered.

2. Professors who have never practiced engineering are leery to teach engineering practice, because they fail to appreciate its importance to their students, and because they lack the confidence to teach unfamiliar material. There are two possible solutions to this:

a. Provide academics with courses, course modules, texts, and plentiful examples and exercises to allow them to teach a subject they have little familiarity with.

b. Entice more experienced professionals to teach as adjuncts or as second-career Professors of Practice. It is much easier for professionals to become teachers if they are provided with course materials and texts. The alternative to pre-prepared materials is to prepare a course starting from nothing, which is a daunting prospect for a working professional with little teaching experience.

3. Not all engineering education needs to happen within the bounds of the 4 year professional degree. Engineering practice can be taught in short courses or online to young working professionals. Once again the difficulty is to find capable and willing instructors; the best way to encourage potential instructors is to ease the path by providing them with recorded lectures and teaching materials to help run a course.

The vision of the Center for Chemical Engineering Practice is to be a place where chemical engineers dedicated to better teaching future chemical engineers gather to exchange teaching materials, compare notes, and encourage and inspire each other.