Letters: December 2025

What about the industrial perspective?

Dear Emily,

I received my hard copy of the October issue of CEP in the mail today and immediately sat down and read it. It featured one of my favorite topics, Chemical Engineering Education, for which I have coauthored at least three articles for CEP in the past.

All the articles were very interesting, and I thought all had merit in what they communicated.

I especially liked the article on an integrated degree in chemical engineering + data science — as that is essentially what my career was about at Eli Lilly & Co., in automating all their bioprocesses. Part of automating a process is in generating data and sending it to a database so that it can be used by operators and analyzed by technical service personnel to, for example, gain insights in the important variables and correlations in a process. It also provides a documented history of process operations and is also useful in real-time fault analysis in order to quickly determine the root cause of an abnormal process situation. Anyway, the value of having process data available on-line cannot be over-emphasized, and so I am glad to see a degree combining traditional chemical engineering with data science. Said another way, my degree is in chemical engineering — but I had to pick up most of the data science as on-the-job training and education. So it is good to see academia picking up on the value of data science.

My main concern with the issue is that all nine of the authors of the six articles are university academics — with only the last article being written by someone who is an academic but also works for a company. It might seem intuitive... that an issue on education would be dominated by academics, but I have a hard time accepting this, as I think of education as a partnership between...