G.V. "Rex" Reklaitis
Purdue University
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G. V. “Rex” Reklaitis, the Edward W. Comings Professor of Chemical Engineering, has been at Purdue since 1970, serving over the years as assistant dean of engineering, graduate education and research (1985-88), director of the Computer Integrated Process Operations Center (1992-99), and Head, School of Chemical Engineering (1987-2004). During this period he created one of the most effective industrial partnerships in the country through the New Directions Program, which has had a dramatic impact on the School’s growth and curriculum development. Rex then guided the program to one of the largest construction projects in the school’s history-- the new addition to the building, now Forney Hall.
At the heart of his research is the application of computing and systems technology in support of the design and operation of processing systems. His focus has been on batch operations -- heavily used in food, specialty chemicals and pharmaceuticals manufacturing. The co-author of four books, editor of three others and more than 150 papers, Rex’s national awards, include the Computing in Chemical Engineering Award of the AIChE, of which he is a Fellow, as well as the Corcoran Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and has served as director of AIChE, and past president of CACHE.
Rex is also the lead investigator for Purdue and deputy director of the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) on Structured Organic Particulate Systems, a partnership with Rutgers University ( the lead institution), the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the University of Puerto Rico. The purpose of the Center is "to research and improve the way pharmaceuticals, foods and agricultural products are developed and manufactured." According to Rex,“the center will study how to efficiently manufacture such structured materials in large quantities. This could lead to a significant reduction in the cost of manufacturing pharmaceutical, nutritional and agricultural products, and that will help meet the needs of society.”
In the midst of all this he remains a dedicated educator. His course revisions resulted in two textbooks, and he regularly is involved with the senior design course. Most recently he has introduced two new courses in the pharmaceutical engineering domain. At the graduate level he has advised 42 MS and 40 PhD students.
Impressive as an administrator, at the departmental and university level, a researcher, among the leadership of a national research center, or educator, Rex Reklaitis has shown himself to be good citizen of the profession.
Profile
Information about childhood, growing up, and parental recollections?
My ethnic background is Lithuanian and German. The German side originated from East Prussia – many townspeople near the Prussian border with Lithuania were and are of German origin, having lived there for generations. My parents, their siblings and spouses and their parents, all fled Lithuania in late 1941 to escape the impact of Soviet occupation. They moved to Poznan, Poland where they had some close relatives. I was born there but my family soon moved on successively deeper into Germany, eventually settling in Bavaria. My father was killed in the war and thus I have no real recollection of him or of either of my grandfathers. However, I grew up with subtle but persistent reminders that my father and grandfather were both engineers (mechanical). The void left by my father was filled by a bachelor uncle and eventually a step father. I attended the first several years of grade school in Bamberg during which time my mother worked for UN relief organizations. We immigrated to the US when I was 10 years old, settling in Chicago where some of the family had preceded us, and thus I had the opportunity to add English to the Lithuanian and German that were the everyday languages.
Early education, high school, undergraduate and graduate school?
In Chicago, I attended a parochial grade school, St. Leo, and an all-boys high school, St. Rita. I took shop classes as well as science lab classes and participated in band, track, and tennis, without noteworthy distinction. I recall one excellent but eccentric English teacher, who was very effective in developing our writing skills. His weekly essay assignments forced one to organize and write quickly. He was undoubtedly the most notable of my teachers. The mathematics teachers were at best competent, but fortunately, our high school was linked to the Illinois Institute of Technology which offered interesting supplementary math classes during the year and in intensive but short summer periods. I found these experiences quite useful and stimulating. Outside of the school environment, I was active in the Lithuanian Sea Scouts organization, spent lots of time swimming, rowing, sailing, and in summer camps in Michigan and Wisconsin, where I taught these skills to troops of younger boys. Of course, through middle and high school I also attended Saturday Schools in Lithuanian language, literature, history and culture, which were organized by the Lithuanian-American community in Chicago. I also was active in folk dancing groups which performed at various festivals around the city, including annual participation in a large festival held in Chicago involving groups from around the country. Chicago, after all, was and remains the Lithuanian-American capital of the US.
Upon graduation, I attended the Illinois Institute of Technology under scholarship. I gravitated towards chemical engineering because it had the reputation of being the most challenging, it was not mechanical engineering, and too many of my friends chose electrical. However, I never really did enjoy the chemistry labs because they involved too much of following procedures, replicating known results and no real taste of discovery. At IIT I was involved in student organizations such as Alpha Chi Sigma but was even more involved in leadership positions in Lithuanian student organizations in Chicago. It was within the context of these activities that I had the good fortune to meet my wonderful wife, Janine. We were married after our first year of graduate school and are celebrating our 40th anniversary.
Early influences to study chemical engineering?
The strength of IIT education was the personal attention and stimulation that so many of the faculty gave students - even though at the time it was largely a commuter school. I can particularly recall Doc Kintner and his bubbles and drops experiments and his excitement in trying to extract understanding of the complex phenomena of drop coalescence and break-up from grainy film clips. Octave Levenspiel was superb in teaching reaction engineering. He really made that subject alive, intellectually challenging, and often very amusing. Professor Darsh Wasan had been at IIT only briefly when I was ready to graduate, yet he conveyed such an enthusiasm for chemical engineering that he dispelled any doubts in my mind about pursuing graduate education. It is superb faculty such as these that really provide the motivation and encouragement so essential to launching careers.
Upon graduation from IIT, I was convinced that I should study fluid mechanics, and thus at the recommendation of Doc Kintner and others I applied and was accepted at Princeton and Stanford. I chose the latter, in no small part because Janine, who graduated from Loyola University of Chicago in the same year, received a Wilson fellowship for graduate studies at UC Berkeley. It turned out to be a good technical choice as well because I soon discovered that the fluid mechanics of graduate school was not what I had enjoyed as NSF undergrad researcher at IIT, in spite of Andy Acrivos’s challenging first year graduate transport courses. However, Doug Wilde, a pioneer in engineering optimization, did show me an exciting alternative in the research that he was conducting. At the time, Stanford was in fact a hot bed of interdisciplinary work in optimization methods and operations research in general, with exciting courses taught by Dantzig, Luenberger, Howard, Kalman, Cottle, Arrow and others. Indeed, I had the privilege of having Dantzig, the father of linear programming, on my thesis committee. As interested as he was in theory and algorithms, it left a big impression on me that he was very much concerned with implementation and application. In fact, as I was writing my thesis, he on a memorable occasion commented that I really should do more than just prove theorems, but that the algorithms should be implemented and tested on computers!
Stimulated by Dantzig’s observations and no less by the fact that Janine wanted to spend time in Europe before we “settled down,” I applied for and was awarded an NSF Postdoc Fellowship to work at the Institute for Operations Research and Electronic Data Processing in Zurich, Switzerland. Of the academic leadership at the Institute, Professors Kunzi and Krelle were among the early workers who advanced the computerization of optimization algorithms and their application to practical problems. It was there that I really delved into serious Fortran programming and comparative numerical testing. During the year in Zurich, I attended my first meeting (in Florence) of the European Working Party on the use of Computers in Chemical Engineering, beginning a long string of participation in this annual conference series.
Early career experiences and influences?
Prior to heading out to Zurich, I had interviewed at several universities for teaching positions as well as at industrial R&D organizations with strong interests in optimization and computing applications. Among the industrial opportunities Esso Math Systems looked extremely interesting from a research perspective, but in the end we came to Purdue, in part because of the encouragement provided by Professors Bob Greenkorn, who was then Head, Lowell Koppel, Henry Lim and Jack Woods.
Mentors or influences in your career/life?
When I arrived at Purdue, I was immediately assigned to teach a senior year, two semester sequence in process design and optimization. The latter subject I was comfortable with but the former presented quite some challenge. Fortunately, Jack Woods came to the rescue with lots of examples, notes and advice, and a homegrown process simulation package. Jack also had a number of industry contacts who could be counted on to provide interesting case problems. Unfortunately, his software was continually in a state of flux and forecasted quite remarkably the failure prone software of the Microsoft era. We had to quell many a student revolt when the software failed miserably right before a big assignment was due and the hastily inserted patch made things even worse. However, on the plus side Jack knew many of the ChE faculty active in process simulation and optimization, and thus I developed contacts with Motard (Washington University), Johnson at Western Ontario (Canada) Carnahan (Michigan), Seider (Penn), Seader (Utah), Evans (MIT), Westerberg (CMU) and others. It is through these contacts that I was elected to CACHE and became active in AICHE.
One or two significant career projects or activities?
One of the early larger research projects in my career was launched in 1976. The oil crisis had led to a wave of interest in new processing technologies for synthetic fuels from coal. Jack Woods and I were fortunate to receive a major DOE grant and subsequent extensions to build process modeling and simulation tools and to apply them to several promising proposed new processes. This project served as a marvelous vehicle to learn about energy issues, coal process technology, detailed reactor modeling and process systems tools such as process flowsheet modeling, physical properties estimation, and the computations associated with flowsheet convergence and optimization. We even delved into automated flowsheet drawing and facilities layout methods. This work was terminated when the energy crisis was over. However, the MIT project led by Larry Evans which had proceeded in parallel with ours managed to attract the attention of major chemical companies by virtue of Larry’s keen recognition that Monsanto’s commercial Flowtran system would provide a reliable although not bleeding-edge platform for development that industry could support and his remarkable entrepreneurship talents in attracting the needed funding to continue post-DOE. AspenTech is now the dominant software company providing engineering software for the CPI.
The abrupt close of this research thrust led me to change directions substantially – to investigate the application of process systems methodologies to a totally different sector of the CPI – batch processing. In 1982 we began work in this area under NSF funding and have evolved this research track over the past 20 years. Our research has focused on the operational and design issues associated with batch and semicontinuous processing and the modeling and optimization methodologies necessary to address problems of industrial relevance. Our group has pioneered the development of combined discrete continuous simulation methods for batch/semicontinuous processes, scheduling, planning and design models and solution methods as well as quantitative approaches to treating uncertainty and risk. We have advanced the use of nonuniform time discretization models, multipurpose plant design and operations approaches, as well as the simulation-optimization strategy for accommodating supply chain and product pipeline management decision problems under uncertainty. I co-directed the NATO Advanced Study Institute on Batch Processing Systems Engineering, Turkey, which led to a directionally important, edited book. The applications of this research have expanded from the production line and plant level to enterprise level decision problems such as supply chain management and product pipeline management. In recent years, I have directed this line of research towards the development, design and manufacturing of pharmaceutical products and processes, which are almost exclusively batch in nature.
Most enjoyable phase of career?
The most enjoyable sustained activity of my career in education has been to work with the over 80 graduate students whom I have had the pleasure to advise on MS and PhD theses research. This is one-on-one education in which initially the advisor provides guidance and in the end the student teaches the advisor. This to me is the most satisfying and stimulating work that one can undertake in higher education.
After stepping down as Head of the School, I feel that I have entered into the most enjoyable phase of my career -- working with colleagues at Purdue in building a research and educational program focused on the development and manufacture of pharmaceutical products. It has exposed me to some very challenging research problems that really stretch process systems engineering methodology. This endeavor has led to building collaborations with non-engineering colleagues at a number other schools, new contacts in industry and the federal government – to say nothing of the collaboration with a fine group of colleagues from pharmacy and engineering at Purdue. I am convinced that the time is right for major changes in this industry through innovations in science and engineering. I hope to be able to contribute to accelerating these changes.
Most significant contributions to profession and society?
Professional service: I have been editor of Computers & Chemical Engineering for twenty years and it has grown to be one of the top journals in our profession, ranking just behind the AIChE Journal. It has been a marvelous window through which to witness the intellectual vigor of our profession in harnessing the power of IT and computing technology.
Within AIChE: I have held leadership positions in the CAST Division, Publications Committee, and Executive Board of the National Programming Committee (EBPC); served as Annual Meeting Program chair (2002), as well as member of the Board of Directors; initiated the focus on process operations in the Division; led review of AIChE publications and set the stage for AIChE partnership with Wiley in journals and book publication; and led the introduction of web-based tools in AIChE conference program management.
Within the Council for Chemical Research: I served as chair of the International Committee as well as member of the Governing Board and of Executive Committee; and led studies and workshops on international models in research collaboration across industry-university-government sectors as well international trends in graduate education and training of chemists and chemical engineers.
CACHE trustee: For over 25 years, I have served in all elected offices and led the first CACHE conference on Foundations of Computer Aided Process Operations (1987). This conference series has become institutionalized on a five year rotation with the fifth in the series in planning for 2008.
With Professors Takamatsu (Kyoto) and Sargent (Imperial College) I helped to institutionalize the international series of Process Systems Engineering symposia, held every three years in rotation between Europe, Asia and Americas. This has become the premier international conference in the process systems engineering field. I have served as member of the Executive Committee since 1988 and chaired the 7th PSE Symposium in 2000. The series has continued with the 10th PSE Symposium to be held in 2009 in Brazil.
In administration: I served as Head of the School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue for 16 years. In that period I helped to recruit 23 faculty to the School, including the majority of the present faculty. The junior faculty were highly successful in winning competitive young investigator awards (NSF, ONR, NIH). Through much of that period the School maintained the largest ChE undergraduate program in the country and consistently ranked among the top five in PhD awards in ChE.
During my tenure, the industrial partnership program, New Directions in Chemical Engineering, which brought over 20 companies into active participation in the development and funding of School educational and facilities initiatives, was initiated. At its peak this activity brought over $1 million of unrestricted funding annually into the School for educational, faculty start-up and facilities projects. The New Directions partnership was seen as a model for effective collaboration with industry and alumni in advancing the goals of the School. Regular strategic planning was initiated beginning in 1988 which led to systematic growth and development of the School in faculty, staff and facilities. We also initiated the alumni award, Outstanding Chemical Engineer, in 1989 which has since recognized some 90 of the 9000 ChE alumni. This award program has since been adopted by the other engineering units.
Over the period 89-99 I developed internal and external funding for over $5 million in facilities, equipment and renovation projects in the existing ChE building. Beginning in 1999, I led a capital campaign for construction of the new adjoining chemical engineering building and further renovation of the existing building. The result was $25 million in private funding which allowed the construction of the new addition that provided nearly 100,000 sq ft of gross space, doubling the departmental space. Forney Hall was dedicated in fall 2004 as the first fully privately funded engineering academic building on the Purdue campus.
How would you like to be remembered?
I would like to be remembered as an academic who made significant contributions in all aspects of his professional endeavor: teaching through innovative text books and effective mentoring of research students, research in multiple areas of process systems engineering, professional service through leadership in national organizations and archival publications, and administrative at the department and center level.
On the personal side, I would like to be remembered as the proud father of two wonderful sons, Victor and George, who have become wiser, savvier and better read the older they get. Their ability to balance work accomplishments, friendships and enjoyment of life in general far exceeds what I have been able to embody in my own life.
What do you consider your most significant award/recognition?
The most significant recognition I have received is election to the National Academy of Engineering. The membership of the NAE constitutes the intellectual leadership of the engineering profession. It is a great honor to be deemed worthy to be associated with them. A close second, however, is the AICHE Computing in Chemical Engineering Award. This award is important to me because it is recognition by my immediate peers, working in the same field. Moreover, it was a recognition received relatively early in my career which has served as significant stimulus to continue to contribute to this field and the profession.
Who do you consider the most memorable person you have known? Why?
It is difficult for me to single out the most memorable professional since several were very important to me but for different reasons. Outside of the professional domain, clearly my wife has been and continues to be the most important influence because of her ability to see when I do not, to understand when I do not, to criticize when needed and to encourage and support when it is pivotal.
What is your single major prediction about the future of chemical engineering?
Chemical engineering is being re-energized and will flourish with important contributions to biotechnology, energy, and innovative materials and in providing the technical leadership for vital industry sectors such as fuels, synthetic materials, and pharmaceutical products.
What is your greatest hope and concern about the future of the profession?
My greatest hope is that chemical engineering will become the lead profession for industry sectors beyond the well established fuels and chemicals domains – sectors such as pharmaceuticals, nanomaterials and bioprocessing.
My greatest concern is that chemical engineering will lose touch with its core strength, which is the focus on processing and systems, to become simply a profession of applied scientists.
Advice for new graduates entering the profession?
The future of the US lies in novel technical ideas and product and process innovations. This is where the growth will be. My advice is that students choose career paths that best suit their talents but also to focus on those fields and industry sectors that will allow them to contribute to the generation and realization of those innovations. This is how engineers can have the biggest impact.
On a societal level, new graduates need to be champions of technical literacy. This nation and world face many critical issues relating to energy, health care, and the environment. There are myths and misguided beliefs that all too often obscure the real issues. This country needs to make rational decisions in these important domains based on the best understanding and technology. Our engineering graduates need to intelligently participate in the national debates in these domains if this country is to flourish over the long term.
Advice for high schoolers considering chemical engineering?
Chemical engineering is the engineering discipline that most closely integrates the three basic sciences -- biology, chemistry, physics--and the language of quantitative science, mathematics, with engineering methodology. Because of these components it is one of the most challenging of the engineering disciplines, but for the same reason it is also the one that provides the most flexibility for successful careers, both in technical areas and in areas in which broad exposure to technology provides leverage, e.g., patent law, management of technology-based enterprises, etc.
Anything about you that very few people know that you would like to share?
Nope!
Editor:
Frank S. Oreovicz (oreovicz@purdue.edu)
Communication Specialist
School of Chemical EngineeringPurdue University