Institute for Sustainability
Darlene Schuster is the Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainability, an AIChE Technological Community, where she oversaw the development of the industry, membership and youth-focused entities formed to advance the science and state of sustainability. Previously she served as the Senior Director of Institute Alliances and Director of Government Relations for AIChE and as a Science Policy Fellow for the American Chemical Society, where she worked to educate congressional staff and Congress on technical policy issues. Dr. Schuster was awarded the 2004 Technical Achievement Award from the Central Pennsylvania Engineers Council in part for contributions to novel technology product development and commercialization by her company, DP Group, Inc.
Previously, Dr. Schuster was the Clare Boothe Luce Chair of Chemical Engineering at Bucknell University, and an Engineer, Senior Engineer, and Research Engineer with Gulf Oil Production Research, which subsequently became Chevron Oil Field Research Company. Dr. Schuster holds a BSChE (WVU), MSChE (University of Pittsburgh),and PhD. (West Virginia University).
As a professor, Dr. Schuster integrated design methodology and systems analysis into chemical kinetics, process control, the freshman engineering program, statistics, transport phenomena courses and introduced new courses on fluidization, particle technology, waste minimization, and pollution prevention and incorporating societal ethics with engineering design. She also coordinated the team taught, multidisciplinary freshman engineering program. In industry, she served as the Gulf Oil and then Chevron member of the American Petroleum Institute Committee on Static Petroleum Measurement and Committee on Dynamic Petroleum measurement and chaired a working group on statistics for the Manuel on Petroleum Measurement Standards. Recently, she was as a Co-PI on the NSF Active Chemistry curriculum project; a novel high school chemistry curriculum taught from a design perspective, and is the program manager for the United Engineering Foundation project on development of the AIChE Sustainability Index--a benchmark for industry, and the Founder Society Technology for Carbon Management project.