John Prausnitz
UC Berkeley
In the fall of 1955, John Prausnitz came to the UC Berkeley campus as a young assistant professor and set up his office in 308 Gilman Hall. In 2007, he reflected on his career from the same office, where he has worked for 52 years. In a multidimensional life subject to many variables — teaching, publishing, traveling, raising a family and receiving many honors — Prausnitz’s office has been one of the few constants.
Prausnitz, born in 1928 in Berlin, came to the United States at an early age. He was raised in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Queens, NY — a more remote and green suburb than today. Growing up in New York City, Prausnitz developed a life-long love of opera and classical music from listening to WQRX radio. He remains fond of English and German literature and music, especially Mendelssohn, Mozart and Schubert.
He was gifted in math and physics and was fortunate to have a good chemistry teacher in high school. When it came time to pick a major for college, his mother’s friends told him chemical engineers were well-paid and, thus, his choice was determined.
Prausnitz started at Cornell in 1945, attending a five-year program in chemical engineering. At age 17 he was ill-at-ease among the older veterans returning to college after WWII. But he thrived in the rich intellectual atmosphere of Cornell, where his chemical engineering program required two semesters of history of science. This background “showed me the relationship between culture and technology,” says Prausnitz, a relationship he has retained all his life. “I was not as intellectually isolated then as my Berkeley students are today,” he says.
After Cornell, he spent a year at the University of Rochester to obtain a master’s degree. Then, it was on to Princeton’s Graduate College. There he lived in a small suite, with a living room and butler service. The graduate students wore scholarly gowns to dinner, grace was said in Latin, and they were entertained by prominent guest speakers. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of many prominent visitors, but she could not dine in the men-only dining room; she ate in a smaller private room.
Prausnitz maintains strong interests in the history of science and in philosophy and theology, stemming from encounters with Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and Martin Buber at Princeton and in New York.
Like many newcomers to the Berkeley campus, it took several months for Prausnitz’s living situation to settle down. Prausnitz stayed at first in a room in The Faculty Club, about 50 yards from his office. “But it was pretty sad, especially on weekends,” he says, “and therefore I moved to the International House where it was excessively noisy and where everyone on the floor could listen to telephone conversations because there was only one communal phone in the hall.”
In June 1956, Prausnitz’s housing adventures ended when he married Susan Bergmann, whom he had met through family friends in New York. They first lived in an apartment on Berkeley’s Arch Street, famous for its rose walk. The apartment had an enclosed back porch with a view of the San Francisco Bay. The rent was $90/month. The back porch was Prausnitz’s study where he wrote the first edition of his book, Molecular Thermodynamics of Fluid-Phase Equilibria.
In 1958 the couple moved up into the Berkeley Hills and in 1963 bought the house they still call home. The couple raised two children who attended Berkeley public schools. Their first child, Stephanie, arrived in 1962, followed by Mark, in 1966.
One child stayed close to home geographically, the other academically. Today Stephanie works as a public health research coordinator at Berkeley’s Alta Bates Summit Medical Center. She earned a masters degree in public health at Harvard and plays the fiddle in an all-woman, old-time music band called “The Stairwell Sisters.”
Son Mark is professor of chemical engineering at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. He works on medical devices and is an adjunct professor at the Emory University School of Medicine. He and his physician wife have three small children.
Prausnitz earned tenure in 1960, advanced to full professor in 1963, and became Professor in the Graduate School in 2004. He remains active in his emeritus status.
Prausnitz is probably the only engineering professor anywhere to have produced a Ph.D. graduate, Bryan Rogers, with a joint degree in chemical engineering and art, who used chemical engineering principles as the basis for fluid kinetic sculptures. Rogers is now chair of the art department at the University of Michigan.
Prausnitz recently answered questions about his long and distinguished career at Berkeley:
What drew you to Berkeley?
I was attracted to Berkeley because of Joel Hildebrand. I had read his books as a graduate student at Princeton and I greatly admired his work. Also, [Kenneth] Pitzer, [Leo] Brewer and the lovely Bay Area were magnets.
My goal was to take what I had learned from people like Hildebrand in physical chemistry and apply it to chemical engineering. Hildebrand had worked with the thermodynamics of liquid mixtures. I took what I learned from his papers as well as those from Pitzer and Brewer and developed them for chemical engineering. This activity kept me busy for many years. In more recent years, I have been applying what I know about liquid mixtures to polymers and protein solutions; Hildebrand, Brewer and Pitzer never worked on proteins.
How has the chemical engineering department evolved during your tenure?
Chemical engineering at Berkeley was very young when I arrived because it had only come into being in 1946 and had a slow start. One of the reasons was that the first professor had become ill and died soon after he started to develop a chemical engineering program. Also, chemical engineering had started simultaneously in two places, in the College of Chemistry and in the College of Engineering. Engineering had a program called process engineering with nearly the same curriculum as that of chemical engineering. There was a lot of disagreement as to where chemical engineering should be located.
But then Clark Kerr became chancellor in the early 1950s and decided that chemical engineering belonged in the College of Chemistry. One reason for his decision was that’s where the students were. The students had already voted with their feet, and process engineering was phased out.
In 1955 there were only six faculty members and one secretary for all of us. A phone was a luxury. Most of us did not have our own phones. If I wanted to make a call, I had to go to the secretary’s office. This smallness led to a close-knit community within the department: six faculty members and fifteen graduate students. We all knew each other quite well and met for coffee most afternoons.
In the tradition started by G. N. Lewis shortly after his arrival in Berkeley (1912), we also had a college-wide seminar in the evenings a couple of times a month where speakers from different fields of chemistry and chemical engineering would lecture. Eventually that was moved to the afternoon and then it just disappeared over time. Now people are more narrowly occupied with their own area. Those seminars were very useful. They provided a wide window on the chemical world.
What are you currently working on in the laboratory?
Harvey Blanch and I have had a very successful collaboration for the past dozen years. We try to establish applied biothermodynamics. Also, Clay Radke and I have been working on next-generation contact lenses. Right now, if you wear contacts, you have to take them out and clean them, take good care of them to avoid eye infection. We are working on contact lenses that would be semi-permanent; you could leave them in for close to a month before cleaning, at least that is the hope. There are lots of issues that come up and we are far from our goal. Radke is a former Ph.D. student of mine with a delicious sense of humor and it is most gratifying to work with him.
I am also interested in drug-delivery systems these days. Many people are trying to deliver drugs in a regulated way. For example, we can put a polymer coating around the drug that regulates the rate of delivery. We have to choose the right polymer and thickness to control the rate of release. I am particularly interested in this because of my son Mark at Georgia Tech who works with transdermal drug patches. How do these patches work? What is the solubility of the drug in the polymer? We need to understand how the drug gets out of the patch, through the skin and into the bloodstream. I like to discuss this with my colleague Nitash Balsara whose knowledge of polymer science is truly impressive.
What else are you working on?
I am currently writing a book with J. Z. Wu at UC Riverside concerning statistical mechanics for chemical engineering. There are many books out there (Berkeley chemistry professor David Chandler has written one of the best), but they are not primarily application-oriented and for most students, they are too high-level. Wu and I are trying to write something that will be useful for beginners and that emphasizes modern, high-tech applications.
What are your thoughts about the education of our undergraduate students?
Ah, this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I am troubled by what I consider the intellectual isolation of the College of Chemistry. We perform very well here, but I don’t think we pay enough attention to the social sciences, the arts, the humanities, and philosophy. In today’s world, we need to know more than just science, we should understand its place in the world, know more about ethics and sociology, about how science and engineering interface with culture.
The classic way to achieve this is to have our students take more courses in other areas, or have special courses, like “culture for engineers,” but this is not a feasible option. Compared to other Berkeley curricula, we currently have the highest number of academic requirements for our undergraduates; our students work quite hard and there is no time for additional “culture” courses. More important, when “culture” and engineering are in separate courses, the materials aren’t integrated and the students often fail to see the connection. I am trying to find a way to incorporate some humanities into teaching chemistry and chemical engineering.
For effective broad education, we need to integrate “culture” into the chemistry and chemical engineering courses directly. I think most professors would be willing to do it, if they had help; we need books and educational materials. I think teaching our students, maybe ten minutes, twice a week, saying something about how chemistry and engineering relate to the rest of the world would be helpful. I have started to work with the Berkeley Center for the Study of Higher Education. We have started what I call the “Bronowski Project” to develop case studies that will be available on the internet. Regrettably, it is very difficult to obtain financial support for such activities.
What do you consider to be your greatest achievement?
Unfortunately my greatest achievement at Berkeley has disappeared. I lectured in 219 Gilman Hall for many years, and on rainy days the students’ rain gear would litter the room, making an obstacle course. I tried for quite some time to convince the authorities to do something about it, to put up some sort of coat racks and umbrella stands. But I got the usual bureaucratic run-around. Finally, fed up, a few of my graduate students and I went to the hardware store and bought a bagful of hooks and screws. We put up 20-30 hooks on the wall for raincoats and umbrellas, and rainy days were never the same. The hooks were there for about 30 years. Unfortunately, offices have now replaced the classrooms, and the hooks are gone.
I have been happily married for over 50 years; my wife has been a tremendous help to me in furthering my career. I have a New Yorker magazine story in my office that explains why chemical engineers make good husbands. Chemical engineers tend to be steady, reliable and conscientious. Many wives like that. But other women think we’re dull. I suspect that both are correct.
How do you spend your spare time?
I enjoy hiking, but I’m not a mountain climber. I like the kind of hiking where you take a train or gondola up the mountain, walk around for a while, find a nice chalet for coffee and cake, then take the train or gondola back down the mountain. That kind of hiking is rare in the U.S. but easy to do in Europe, particularly Switzerland. In the Bay Area, I like to pack a lunch and hike in one of the many parks we have here.
I am also a music fan, particularly of Mozart. I have a large collection of opera and chamber music and am going to the noon concert today, after this interview.
I am also an avid reader, mostly non-fiction. Two of my favorite recent books are a biography of John Nash, an economist and mathematician from Princeton, and a biography of Knut Hamsun, one of Norway’s most famous writers. In recent years, I have been much impressed by the history-of-ideas essays of Isaiah Berlin. I also like the subtle humor in David Lodge’s novels about academics and their prejudices. Occasionally, I watch specific television shows; I am absolutely hooked on “Masterpiece Theatre.” Until its recent demise, I enjoyed “Wall Street Week.” The investing advice isn’t worth much but often there are some good jokes.
What advice would you give to scientists just starting out?
That’s a tough question. I would have to tell them: choose a field, a research topic that you truly enjoy, not a fad. Fads come and go, and I’ve seen a lot of fads over the years. One impediment is financial pressures. Fads are funded while they’re hot, but then that’s it. Do what you like to do and interact with other scholars, including those from other departments who can broaden your horizons. In any field, knowledge grows at the field’s boundaries, not at its center.
Also, try to find an area where there is expertise around you, on the Berkeley campus, not necessarily in the College of Chemistry or the College of Engineering. If you can take an idea from another area, it can be a catalyst for your own research. The basis of creativity comes from finding the connection between two areas that previously were separate. That was the genius of Josiah Willard Gibbs. He showed that the science of heat engines (thermodynamics) could be generalized to provide a powerful tool in physical chemistry. In 1875, that was a brand new, radical idea.
Former Berkeley chemical engineering chair Arup Chakraborty honored Prausnitz as “a living legend of the chemical engineering profession who is among the most distinguished members of the Berkeley faculty.” Over four decades, his research group has led the application of thermodynamic principles, experimental methods, and computer programs that make possible the efficient design of separation processes in the petroleum and petrochemical industries.
Prausnitz is one of the few people in the United States who is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received four honorary degrees from around the world. He is a rare scientist who, like an artist or musician, has had equally creative early, middle, and late periods in his career.
Prausnitz has invested exceptional time and effort in his students, both undergraduates and graduates alike, teaching them the secrets of science and engineering and the importance of critical thinking. He has mentored 78 Ph.D. students and 49 M.S. students.
One of his goals has been to span the wide gap between the theories of physical chemistry and molecular physics and statistical mechanics on the one hand, and the real needs of the design engineer on the other. “I have always, in a sense, been a communicator between chemical engineers and physical chemists,” Prausnitz says. “It has been my concern to make chemical processes, such as the separation of raw petroleum into various products, more efficient, safer and more environmentally friendly. A better understanding of thermodynamic properties for chemical engineering has helped to accomplish this.”
The forest of towers at oil refineries are distillation columns that separate crude oil into a plethora of products such as gasoline, kerosene and heating oil. Prausnitz developed the concepts that enable these columns to operate with minimal danger of fires or explosions, and without wasting energy or raw materials.
According to Nobel Laureate Steven Chu, Director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “John’s contributions to large-scale chemical manufacturing processes have greatly conserved the use of energy while substantially sparing the environment. These are two of the most important challenges facing all of science, and he has met them both.”
Prausnitz was recognized in March 2006 by the journal Fluid Phase Equilibria in its first issue “to honor an individual of significance in the areas of the Journal.” According to journal coeditor and former student John P. O’Connell, “John Prausnitz’s work resulted in one of the great paradigm shifts in the chemical sciences and engineering. He created the discipline of molecular thermodynamics for chemical technology.”
Prauznitz himself explains by example. “Nature gives us mixtures,” he says, “but we need pure substances. Therefore, we require separations — whether it’s removing impurities from natural gas, distilling pure nitrogen and oxygen from the air, or separating complex proteins from complex bioreactor broths. To separate gases and solutions effectively, you have to know molecular thermodynamics.”
Prausnitz has published nearly 700 papers, coauthored two major textbooks and made hundreds of presentations all over the world. In 2005, he was given the 2003 National Medal of Science, the nation’s highest scientific honor, by President Bush at the White House, where Prausnitz admired the remarkable furnishings and décor. Summarizing his experience there, he says that the White House was much more impressive than its occupant.
Although often acknowledged for the depth of his scholarship in chemical engineering, throughout his five decades at Berkeley, Prausnitz has also maintained his broad knowledge of other disciplines. He is a Renaissance man, with interests that span history, music, theology, literature and art.
In recent years, Prausnitz has been thinking and writing on a topic of special interest, chemical engineering in the postmodern world. “Chemical engineering needs to be reinvented if it is to remain relevant,” says Prausnitz. “Because our task is to serve society, our attitudes and our activities need to adjust to what a changing society expects and demands, even if these expectations and demands go beyond our traditional views of chemical engineering.”