In professional life, the influences that teach us, inspire us and drive us to succeed tend to come more from individuals than corporations. If you would like to bring recognition to someone whose excellence in chemical engineering you admire, consider nominating him or her for Chemical Engineering’s 2010 Personal Achievement Award. The nomination period is now open.
The aim of this award, which Chemical Engineering (CE) has offered biennially since 1968, is to honor individuals for distinguished careers. It complements CE’s Kirkpatrick Award for Chemical Engineering Achievement, presented in the alternate years, which honors companies — as opposed to individuals — for specific chemical-process accomplishments.
Our Personal Achievement Awards have saluted excellence in diverse areas — research, development, design, plant operations, management and other activities. The distinction can emerge in less-ordinary ways, such as government service. The criterion is that the career must have related, fully or largely, to the use of chemical engineering principles in solving industrial, community or other problems.
It’s easy to nominate
Submitting an award nomination is a simple matter:
1. State the name, job title, employer and address of the candidate.
2. Prepare a summary, in up to about 500 words, that highlights your nominee’s career and brings out his or her creativity and general excellence in the practice of chemical engineering technology. At least some of the activity must have taken place during the three-year period ending Dec. 31, 2009. Be specific about key contributions or achievements. But do not include confidential information in your writeup.
3. Please be sure to include your own name and address, in case we need to contact you.
4. Send your nomination no later than April 15 to:
Nanette Santiago
Chemical Engineering
110 William St., 11th floor
New York, NY 10038
Email: [email protected]
We encourage you to ask others to provide information in support of the nominee; ask them to write to us by April 15. Such input has often proved to be decisive during the judging.
What’s next
Once we receive a nomination, we will ask the candidate whether he or she is willing to be considered (you may instead do so yourself and include a note to that effect in your nomination). Meanwhile, we might take any steps that seem called for to verify the accomplishments stated in the brief or the supporting letters.
Next, we will send all the nominations to a panel of senior chemical engineering educators, who will evaluate and rank them. Based on the voting of these judges, we will designate one or more winners. Then we will inform all the nominees and nominators about the results of the voting.
An article in Chemical Engineering around the end of this year will profile the winners. Around the same time, we will present physical embodiments of the awards to these individuals.
Points to keep in mind
Nominees can be from any country. They need not hold a degree in chemical engineering. But their achievements must have involved use of chemical-engineering principles in solving problems, and part of the activity must have been in 2007 – 2009.
The Personal Achievement Award has been hailed and respected since its inception. We welcome your nomination, to help us maintain this worthwhile activity.
Recent award winners
When thinking about whom to nominate, keep in mind that a distinguished career can take many forms. Here, for instance, are the most recent winners:
Brian W. S. Kolthammer, research fellow at The Dow Chemical Co., may be best known for his pioneering work in the kinetic modeling of catalyst systems and their process adaptation to solution, process-polymerization plants for the manufacture of polyolefins. This work has enabled record pacing in the successful scaleup and commercialization of new, major plastomer and elastomer product lines.
Shyam Lakshmanan, group general manager at See Sen Chemical Bhd & Malay-Sino Chemical Industries Sdn Bhd, has been hailed as the “foremost person” at his company responsible for achieving plant capacity improvements and water, fuel and electricity savings.
Henry Kister, of Fluor, has been hailed as the world’s foremost authority on distillation and absorption troubleshooting. He has written two widely consulted engineering books on distillation, as well as over 70 articles, and has taught courses and spearheaded symposia in distillation.
Rebekkah Marshall