I recently caught up with Christine M. Hrenya, PhD, professor of chemical and biological engineering at University of Colorado at Boulder, and associate editor at AIChE Journal, on the upcoming Meet the Presidents event at this year's AIChE Annual Meeting in San Francisco.
What is your role for the 2016 Annual Meeting in San Francisco?
As meeting program chair, my main role is to oversee various aspects of the Annual Meeting — programming, marketing, communications, etc. Thankfully AIChE has a tremendous staff that spearheads the logistics and provides seemingly endless support. So I focus my time on the bigger picture items and new ideas, with the goal of continually improving the Annual Meeting to better serve our members.
What was your inspiration for developing the Meet the Presidents session?
When I accepted the invitation to chair the Annual Meeting more than a year ago, I first considered the timing — November 2016 — which immediately brought to mind the U.S. presidential election. Figuring that we would all appreciate an antidote to the long campaign season, and more importantly motivated by the desire to bring back to Annual some of our most accomplished ChE thought leaders, the idea of the Meet the Presidents session was born.
What are you hoping attendees will learn from your event?
The landscape of higher education is changing fast — the way we teach, the cost of tuition and research, and the sources of funding, to name just a few. These changes present tremendous opportunities as well as challenges. The intent of this session is to begin a conversation among the greater chemical engineering community so that we can be proactive and foster positive change from our positions in industry, academe, and national laboratories.
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Christine Hrenya
Christine Hrenya is a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Colorado. Her interests lie in the field of multiphase and solids flows, using a combination of theory, simulation, and experiments. Read more