“Close your eyes and try to imagine a world without chemistry.” These were the opening words of Rebecca Liebert’s AGILE Award Keynote Address that kicked off the 2025 AIChE Spring Meeting and Global Congress on Process Safety (GCPS) in Dallas, TX last month. As President and Chief Executive Officer of The Lubrizol Corporation, Liebert’s keynote focused on several Lubrizol innovations that have steadily improved industry segments, such as automotive efficiency. Her talk, attended by hundreds of engineers working across all areas of the chemical process industries, challenged listeners to consider the myriad ways that chemistry impacts our daily lives.
One of the most interesting parts of Liebert’s lecture summarized her picks for the top five chemistries enabling the modern world. Her choices included: the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia production, polyethylene, liquid crystal displays, penicillin, and the contraceptive pill. I found Liebert’s final choice of chemistry to be especially brave — particularly when presented to a room of predominantly men.
What I liked most about Liebert’s keynote was its simplicity. She encouraged the audience to pursue a varied career path — emphasizing the importance of continual learning over climbing the “career ladder.” She urged attendees to make their own work processes more efficient and sustainable — beginning by examining their office spaces to look for waste. Simple and clear phrasing is often the best way to leave an indelible memory of your message, and Liebert’s address achieved this where other, more technical or research-oriented presentations often fail.
This kind of real-world, foundational insight has always been one of the cornerstones of the Spring Meeting and GCPS. It is part of what has made these conferences so valuable to engineers and to us on the CEP team. From process safety best practices to distillation rules of thumb, these essential messages make up the backbone of the information CEP aims to share.
This issue of CEP returns to the basics in many ways. For example, the article on pp. 36–43, “Spirited Engineering: An Introduction to Distilled Spirits Production,” explores how distilled spirits are made, from grain to glass. The Instrumentation article on pp. 23–29 discusses the many process control standards relevant to chemical engineers, while the article on pp. 30–35 gives readers a basic primer on the U.S. chemical industry’s regulatory framework.
Just as Liebert’s AGILE address inspired attendees to think about the responsibilities chemical engineers have in shaping a sustainable world through chemistry, I hope this issue will spark similar reflection. As you revisit these fundamentals, I invite you to consider how mastering the basics can empower innovation, improve efficiency, and drive meaningful change in your work.
Emily Petruzzelli, Editor-in-Chief
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