Deparment News

Dan Mowry: New Undergraduate Lab Manager and Teaching Associate

Dan Mowry recently joined the Chemical Engineering Department as Undergraduate Lab Manager and Teaching Associate. Mowry received his B.S. from Georgia Tech in 1965 and his M.S. from the U of Illinois in 1967. He worked for duPont as a co-op while in undergraduate school and for two years after graduating. He then moved to Humble/Exxon/ExxonMobil and worked on their process control computer systems until retirement in 2001. Mowry reports that he still enjoys programming "when I have the time," although now "it's mostly on PCs."

Mowry began helping to maintain the process control systems in the Unit Ops Lab as a part-time volunteer. Then he "got roped into training to be an instructor in ChE 4162 too. So far, it's kept me pretty busy, but I'm beginning to get the hang of it, and look forward to helping some young folks become better engineers."

Mowry and his wife, Mary, enjoy taking long walks together and look forward to taking long trips together when she retires. For the last 15 years, bowling has been his main athletic-"if you can call it that"-endeavor.

Honoring Norbert Rilleux, Pioneer in Chemical Engineering

On April 18, 2002, Dillard University in New Orleans honored Norbert Rillieux and his work with a National Historic Chemical Landmark status ceremony. Norbert Rillieux (1806-1894), was an African American Chemical Engineer who developed the triple evaporator process for sugar refining in 1843. His vacuum evaporation technology is the basis for almost all modern industrial evaporation processes. To learn more about Rillieux and his fascinating life, see Norbert Rillieux: Chemical Engineer and Free Black Cousin of Edgar Degas, in the Summer 1998 edition of Chemical Heritage, the newsmagazine of the Chemical Heritage Foundation.

Shell Oil Awards Grants

The Shell Oil Company Foundation has awarded $20,000 to the Department of Chemical Engineering. The department has used the grant to assist in the on-going progress of upgrading the undergraduate laboratory facilities and in purchasing additional equipment and materials to improve the performance of laboratory experiments. The funds were also used to purchase auxiliary equipment to complement the efforts of the department to network all of the experiments onto a single computer control system.

ABET Accreditation Survey Added to Alumni Website

The ABET 2000 accreditation process requires our department to define a list of program outcomes and to establish an assessment procedure to determine whether these outcomes are being achieved.

We recognize that our alumni are a valuable resource for assessing the quality of our program and for developing suggestions to improve it. We have recently added a Program Outcomes survey page to our alumni website. You can access the survey through the Alumni News section of our department website at www.che.lsu.edu/vb5/alumni_survey. The survey will give you an opportunity to rate the department in each of thirteen areas that have been identified as desired program outcomes. You will also have a chance to list your own specific suggestions for improving our program, including your interest in participating in further curriculum development activities.

A Bit of Humor:

You Might Be a Chemical Engineer If . . .

• You have a favorite pump manufacturer.
• You see a good design and still have to change it.
• You can remember 7 computer passwords but not your anniversary.
• You've modified your can-opener to be microprocessor driven.
• You've actually used every single function on your graphing calculator.
• You've ever considered installing a scrubber on your chimney.
  
  Your ideal evening consists of fast-forwarding through the latest sci-fi movie looking for technical inaccuracies.
• You carry on a one-hour debate over the expected results of a test that actually takes five minutes to run.
• You cannot write unless the paper has both horizontal and vertical lines.
• You think the value of a book is directly proportionate to the amount of tables, charts and graphs it contains.
• You have a habit of destroying things in order to see how they work.
• You think that when people around you yawn, its because they didn't get enough sleep.
• Your work clothes are almost as old as you are.... and so is your car.
• When you look at objects in the distance and think of mean free path.
• You actually use FORTRAN . . . and LIKE it.

(Reprinted courtesy of www.xs4all.nl/~jcdverha/scijokes.)

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