John A. Quinn
University of Pennsylvania

Looking back on the 50 years he has worked to advance chemical and biomolecular engineering science, John Quinn says, "Influencing the next generation of researchers has been the most profound and satisfying part of my career. In academics, you form a true and lasting bond with very bright people at a formative juncture in their lives around shared research interests."

During his years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and previously at the University of Illinois, Quinn supervised more than 40 doctoral dissertations and mentored many junior colleagues. Four of his former graduate students have since been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. One of his graduate students, John L. Anderson, is currently president of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

While Quinn is known among colleagues and former students for his wise and benevolent influence as a mentor, he has been equally influential in engineering science. Quinn earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois in 1954 followed by a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University; he then returned to the University of Illinois faculty as an assistant professor in 1958. By 1966, Quinn was named a full professor (the same year he received AIChE's Colburn Award).

Quinn's early research findings in interfacial phenomena contributed to the understanding of inter-phase mass transfer, monolayer permeability, immobilized liquid films and membrane transport mechanisms.

Soon after Quinn joined the University of Pennsylvania faculty in 1971, he began investigating biological and medical applications for membrane transport phenomena (at the time an emerging application for chemical engineering). "Penn was ideally situated for bio because of the medical school and life sciences activities on campus," says Quinn. "The collaborations I maintained with colleagues in the medical school and the life sciences had a major influence on the direction of my research."

At Penn, Quinn's research group investigated complex media and biological systems such as gas transfer through the skin, enzyme membranes and cell/surface phenomena in biological systems. He and faculty colleague David Graves applied fundamental chemical engineering transport concepts to explain debilitating phenomena experienced by volunteer subjects at Penn's Institute for Environmental Medicine in elevated-pressure dive chambers (the subject of his third Science publication).

Quinn became the first recipient of the Robert D. Bent endowed professorship at Penn in 1978, the same year he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering and received the AIChE Alpha Chi Sigma Award. He served as chair of Penn's Chemical Engineering Department (since renamed the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering) from 1980 to 1985 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. Over his career he enjoyed visiting appointments at Imperial College London, MIT, Cal Tech (as a Fairchild Scholar) and the University of Rome. He retired in 2002 at the age of 70.

He has relished his turn contributing to the unfolding story of scientific discovery coupled with engineering application and to the cultivation of future generations of engineering scientists. One vivid example of his influence led to the overhaul of the FDA approval process for drugs (integrating the use of liver studies to identify and prevent drug-to-drug interactions in the liver), and to the formation of a pharmaceutical company.

Stephen L. Matson was recruited in the 1970s to Quinn's research group at Penn to work on creating a synthetic membrane reactor capable of performing the type of reactive separations that in the body are facilitated by specific enzymes in cell membranes. "This idea for which Steve came to graduate school went all the way to fruition to a billion dollar market that was influenced by this process," says Quinn. "This scientific adventure played out over a period of many years, and gave me great satisfaction."

After completing his Ph.D. under Quinn in 1979, Matson became a co-founder of the firm, Sepracor Inc. In the 1990s, Sepracor developed Allegra®, a successor to the seasonal allergy medication, Seldane (which was pulled off the market due to adverse reactions with other medications and also grapefruit juice during metabolism in the liver).

Jerry Collins, director of the Laboratory of Clinical Pharmacology at the FDA who also completed his Ph.D. at Penn under Quinn in the 1970s, noted, "Our engineering training at Penn was based on a quantitative model of breaking down a complicated system into pieces, understanding the individual pieces, and then assembling them back together. That training, in the scale-up from the bench to the plant, has also been good for the scale-up from the bench to the bedside. We have the tools to inter-connect drug metabolism with the rest of the body."

Now in retirement, John and his wife, Frances, enjoy their four grandsons, their two daughters (one works on Wall Street and the other is head of human resources for an insurance company), and their son who lives in a Rudolf Steiner community in New Hampshire.