Phillip C. Wankat is the Clifton L. Lovell Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and the Director of Undergraduate Degree Programs in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. He earned his BSChE from Purdue, his PhD in chemical engineering from Princeton University and a MSEd from Purdue. His technical research is in separation processes, mainly in the areas of adsorption, chromatography, and distillation. His distillation research has focused on reducing the cost of columns. The adsorption and chromatography research develops new architectures and operating methods for liquid and gas systems. He has published a monograph on Large-Scale Adsorption and Chromatography, which is out-of-print, but is available on Knovel. He also is the author of two textbooks – Separation Process Engineering, 2nd edition of Equilibrium Staged Separations, 2007 (Prentice-Hall) and Rate-Controlled Separations (Springer, 1990). The third edition of Separation Process Engineering is in press and should be available in summer 2011.
Since most engineering professors are not trained in pedagogical techniques, engineering education has not benefited from many of the recent advances in understanding how people learn and how to improve teaching. Phil has been very active in developing new teaching processes, and was a pioneer in teaching graduate students how to teach. He is the co-author of the book Teaching Engineering, available for free, and author of The Effective, Efficient Professor: Teaching, Scholarship and Service, Allyn & Bacon, Boston, 2002. He has won a number of local and national teaching awards.
Phil is an avid fisher who chases smallmouth bass in Indiana on weekends. In the summer he likes to fish for largemouth and smallmouth bass and northern pike in northern Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan. He dreams of 40 inch northern pike.