When Patsy Chappelear became the first female AIChE Fellow in 1980, printed on her commemorative certificate was an acknowledgment of “his” contributions to the field. There were no certificates with the correct pronoun available. At the time, she had been working as a petroleum engineer, researcher, and science advocate for well over two decades, but when she accepted her certificate, she remembered thinking, “It’s just another little thing to get taken care of one day, but I’m not going to do it.” It wasn’t until the induction of the second woman Fellow — Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau — that Chappelear received a corrected certificate, which she now displays placed over the original. Out of playful spite, she intends to donate the original to the Society of Women Engineers.
An early fascination for science
Chappelear, whose maiden name was Stallings, was born under inauspicious circumstances in Burnet, TX, in 1931. At the height of the Great Depression, her childhood experience was not uncommon, with her family frequently relocating across the American South and Midwest as her father looked for work. Although she attended over ten elementary schools, she developed a fascination with engineering from playing with Erector Sets and Lincoln Logs. In high school, she graduated valedictorian of her class and was accepted as an engineering student to Rice Univ., then called the Rice Institute.
Despite her talent at university, she was frequently treated less seriously than her peers. When she met with faculty members to help her decide whether she should pursue chemistry or chemical engineering, the head of the chemistry department told her directly, “Ms. Stallings, it doesn’t make any difference. You’re just going to get married and have children anyway.” On the other hand, the head of the chemical engineering department said that he would be delighted to have her in his class. After that, her choice was clear.
When she received her diploma in 1954, she was only the fourth woman to graduate from Rice’s engineering department — her graduation even made the front page of the local Houston newspaper. As a female engineer, she was greatly outnumbered by her male peers; however, she entered the job market at the very beginning of a cultural sea change, the infancy of the push for companies to become equal-opportunity employers, seeking more representation and rights for women and people of color in industry. This, combined with her high marks and growing talent, allowed her to have her pick of jobs upon graduation. She toured chemical facilities across the American South, eventually becoming a petroleum engineer at Shell Oil and earning the second-highest starting salary in her graduating class.
Building a career and family
She worked in Shell’s Pilot Plant Group, analyzing the applications of Podbielniak extractors in oil treating. At that time, Chappelear began getting involved with engineering organizations, first joining the Society of Women Engineers and then AIChE a few years later. She joined AIChE in the mid-50s, and she was an initial advocate and creator of one of AIChE’s earliest technical divisions, the Petroleum and Petrochemicals Div., now called the Fuels and Petrochemicals Division. She has also always been an advocate for engineers, going on TV and radio panels to discuss her work and becoming a founder of National Engineers Week. A newspaper clipping from the time shows her standing next to the Mayor of Houston nailing the first National Engineers Week placard to a wall using a high-heeled shoe, dubiously referred to in the cutline as “the traditional woman’s hammer.”
The next phase of her career began after marrying fellow Shell employee and theoretical physicist John Chappelear in 1955. It was her male colleagues at Shell who playfully asked her what she wanted in a husband, and, being an engineer, she set about the task methodically, making a complete list of thirty necessary qualities. Within a week of dating her future husband, she recalled, “I pulled out the list on Friday, and he met all of the qualifications, so when he proposed on Saturday, I said yes.” Their marriage was defined by their shared love of science and respect for each other’s intellectual pursuits, and the couple would go on to have four children. They were married for nearly 63 years when John passed away in 2017.
In the 1950s, Shell’s policy prohibited married couples from working together, so Patsy had to begin looking for a new role. She found it at her alma mater, researching clathrates, also called gas hydrates, with her mentor, Professor Riki Kobayashi. Before contemporary X-ray crystallography, engineers had to hypothesize about a clathrate’s possible structure and then perform tests to validate their hypothesis. To better visualize a clathrate’s structure, Chappelear’s team created these theoretical shapes out of cork balls and wood dowels painted with fingernail polish. Their work allowed them to be some of the first researchers to calculate the physical conditions under which clathrates form.
A deaf ear towards prejudice
When recounting the story of her life, Chappelear is less likely to dwell on her subjective experiences as a pioneering female engineer and more inclined to describe her journey through her work. She paints a picture of herself as a dedicated engineer, driven by her passion for science. For the most part, she reacted to prejudice against herself with a laugh and a shrug. “Some people would say off-color jokes,” she recalls. “I never heard them. I had selective deafness.”
Still, she has remained conscious throughout her career of the need for social justice and representation in engineering, even if she is more poised to recognize positive change through the successes of others. She recalls a 1958 AIChE conference to which a Black female civil engineer was an invited guest. When the guest arrived at the convention, the hotel denied her the room she had reserved. “When I tell this to young people, they really don’t understand the prejudice. We nearly cancelled the meeting,” she recounts. “We had to meet her at the front door and escort her every place in the hotel for the entire meeting. We made a point of going into every single room we possibly could. We let [the hotel staff] know we didn’t like them.”
Although she remains keenly aware of prejudice today, Chappelear is proud of the enormous cultural changes within the chemical engineering discipline since she started her career. She has always seen prejudice in the industry as an expression of insecurity. “The real problem in engineering cultures, which is the root of prejudice, whether it is sexual or racial, is primarily from people who are not secure in their own abilities,” she says. “If I could give advice to anybody, I’d say have confidence in yourself and don’t be prejudiced.”
Chappelear continued her clathrate research until eventually transitioning to a role at Hudson Engineering, where she worked as a process engineer on offshore oil facilities and other petrochemical facilities. Through Hudson and other companies, she also worked as a consultant and wrote, edited, and reviewed engineering textbooks and standards. She officially completed her final pro bono project in 2002. Throughout her career, in addition to becoming the first female AIChE Fellow, she would receive numerous accolades, including becoming the Chair of AIChE’s Fuels and Petrochemical Div. in 1981 and being awarded the Outstanding Alumni Engineer Award from the Rice Engineering Alumni Association in 1999. She also served on the AIChE Board of Directors and as a National Director of AIChE from 1984 to 1986. Additionally, she served on advisory boards at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
When Chappelear began working as a process engineer on offshore petroleum facilities, she found it impossible to find personal protective equipment designed for women. She ended up sewing her own protective suit, complete with a stylish, quilted pattern.
Passing responsibility to the next generation
As she entered retirement, she resigned from her volunteer positions in AIChE, happy to let the next generation take on leadership roles. “If you have the old guard around who have always done things, the new people won’t take responsibility unless we give them the opportunity,” she says. She is pleased with the direction her successors have taken the Institute, and still happily attends the occasional meeting.
Today, Chappelear continues to mentor the undergraduate students taught by her daughter, herself an oceanic engineer who formerly worked on a naval submarine and currently teaches at Houston Community College. As she looks to the newest generation of chemical engineers, she emphasizes the importance of understanding chemical engineering fundamentals. After so many years in the field, she has been amazed at the wide range of jobs chemical engineers are able to succeed in, and she has acquired an appreciation for the ways that chemical engineering school prepares students for a diverse range of professions. “For in the application of fundamentals, the sky’s the limit.”
The Center for Oral History at the Science History Institute, in partnership with the Fellows Council of the AIChE, conducted an oral history interview with Patsy Chappelear in January 2024. The transcript may be completed and catalogued in the Science History Institute’s collections by the end of 2025. For more information about its future availability, contact the Center for Oral History at oralhistory@sciencehistory.org.
This article originally appeared in the Profile column in the June 2025 issue of CEP. Members have access online to complete issues, including a vast, searchable archive of back-issues found at www.aiche.org/cep.