// AIChE - The Global Home of Chemical Engineers

AIChE is the professional society for chemical engineers.

For me it started with a letter in my freshman year mailbox in college. I mostly stayed quiet and read Chemical and Engineering Progress (CEP) during my study breaks, wondering what a future in the profession might look like.

After relocating to the San Franicisco Bay Area, I became re-engaged with the Institute and have made some incredible friends and colleagues ever since.

• (2021 - Present) Director, AIChE Chemical Engineering Technology Operating Council (CTOC), which oversees cross-Institute initiatives, standards and best practices

  • Liaison to Management Division

  • Project lead for CTOC’s Four IDEAL Pillars, using data analysis to focusing on equity and fairness in awards, publications, and team effectiveness.

• (2020) Chair, AIChE Management Division, led initiatives on:

  • Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and Allyship in Management

  • Career Development in Engineering Management, including Technical-to-Management transitions

  • Modern Management Practices.

• (2019) Chair, AIChE Northern California Local Section

  • Representing AIChE members in the San Francisco Bay Area

  • Deliver member value through panel discussions, regional seminars, and annual topic-based conferences

  • Secretary for the global Local Sections Committee, which fostered best practices among AIChE’s 7,500 local and regional section members

I hold a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

// Press & Media

• Interview write-up on the allyship of underrepresented groups in management.

• Cool little column in AIChE.org on me introducing the AIChE Management Division to members

• Article in AIChE.org introducing the Northern California Section of AIChE.

// AIChe Annual Meeting in Orlando 2023

• Palm trees, career coaching & emerging management professionals, appreciating that By-Law revisions take a village

• OKRs ready to go for 2024 for CTOC. Goal to improve equity and fairness in publications, awards, leadership pipeline and team effectiveness

• Learning that all career paths have negative derivatives along the pathway from our 2023 Management Award Winner

• Studying quantum computing over chai at Foxtail coffee and thinking about the impact of quantum computing to chemical reactions

• Standing quietly in the back of quantum algorithm poster sessions from grad students 50% my age, 250% my intelligence

• “There’s a great big beautiful tomorrow.” Yes there is. Thank you, Carousel of Progress.

// AIChE Annual Meeting in Phoenix

After serving in volunteer roles in technical societies for much of my professional career, I didn’t expect to be so off my game when attending my first in person conference since the pandemic. From quickly strategizing conference schedules, navigating hotel maps to speaking I had to quickly re-remember How to Conference.

It was an honor to return in a multi-hat capacity as CTOC Board Director, Past Management Division Chair, and Conference Speaker. The best part was seeing colleagues in person after 3 years of exclusively two dimensional video calls.

So proud of the work that’s being done to bring in emerging chemical engineering professionals into a field that is increasingly uncertain and chaotic given the economic climate, to ensure talented underrepresented groups aren’t left behind and see the promise of new technologies like quantum computing make their mark on my home profession.

//AIChE Boston 2021 / Virtual Student Conference

It was great to be joined by Elizabeth Houghton for a discussion on making an impact at the workplace for students and engineers just starting in their careers.

Finding a way to support the well run AIChE Student Conference each year (albeit way more fun in person than on a laptop screen) is something I look forward to each fall. The speakers and career knowledge that gets curated each year for student chemical engineers is something I wish I had available to me as a resource in my own student days.

// Nonlinear Career Paths with Students from Chabot College (November 2021)

Was invited by former AIChE NorCal colleague Mahnaz Firouzi to speak to her engineering students at Chabot College on career paths for engineers.

The poster they created portrayed me as much cooler than I really am, so I felt like there was a high bar to clear so I did my best. I love talking to engineering students about using the engineering thought process behind the degree to overcome the tough academic, personal and professional choices that we all face throughout our careers.

Thanks to everyone who picked this over something else on a Friday afternoon!

// LGBTQIA+ Allies and Young Professionals (February 2021)

In February, had the chance to record a podcast for AIChE’s Doing a World of Good campaign, reuniting with co-panelists from the AIChE Annual Meeting. My voice on the topic was to take a deeper dive into how we can all be supportive leaders regardless of how we identify, serving as champions to our colleagues in the LGBTQIA+ community. Advocacy leadership practices can be an accelerator for inclusive, diverse work environments that benefit teams, businesses and industries. It was a huge honor to be sitting alongside so many strong AIChE’ers who are helping lead this change in the Institute and in the chemical engineering profession.

// Mad Cows and Mad Students (November 2020)

When I entered a top floor conference room in Maryland Hall on the Johns Hopkins University campus, I had barely survived the academic and mental rigors of an undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum, so it was with both hesitation and cautious optimism that guided me to a seat at table.

The class was Protein Solutions Thermodynamics, a special one semester seminar led by then Department Chair, Michael Paulaitis. Of all the subjects in chemical engineering that had sent me spiraling, thermodynamics was my one firm but challenging handhold that saved me (or to use a bouldering term, a two-fingered crimp.)

After learning about mad cow disease and the role of a protein folding in the emergence of prions I became enthralled in using thermodynamics to explain why proteins do what they do. And it was in that class that we learned about the complexities of predicting how proteins will configure themselves. That was the holy grail of that niche area of the field.

So this month’s announcement that Google’s Deepmind had cracked the protein folding problem was an incredible one for me to bear witness to--not just from the puzzle being solved, but the speed at which it had been solved given Deepmind’s AlphaFold “just learned” about protein folding half a year ago.

Machine learning algorithms simply didn’t have the firepower in the late 1990s to solve the protein folding problem, but now that they have, an entire subdiscipline of research has been replaced with another: from predicting how proteins fold to now devising new ways to apply that knowledge to improve proteomics and its contribution to improving human health and well being.

// AIChE Student Virtual Conference (November 2020)

COVID-19 wasn’t going to cut us a break in time for the annual meeting, which had originally been planned to take place in San Francisco this year. So we kicked off the student conference this year virtually as well.

// AIChE Virtual Annual Meeting (November 2020)

The pre-COVID plan this year was a return of the AIChE Annual Meeting to San Francisco. But we’re tackling our virtual platform at this scale for the second time in a row (with even a different virtual lobby atrium and healthy looking virtual plants). SF is here in spirit given that all events are scheduled in US Pacific Time. I’ll have my virtual coffee with me at the Management Division sessions and at Allyship panels.

// 2020 Virtual Spring AIChE Meeting

Participating in this year’s AIChE Spring Meeting, our technical meeting aimed at industry participants and the smaller of AIChE’s two major events of the year. First time attending, presenting, and hosting networking sessions on this new platform. COVID-19 notwithstanding, we’d be doing this in person in San Antonio at the Gonzalez Conference Center, but looking forward to what unique member experiences we can create here.

By mid week, I had co-led the Management Division’s session on Leadership, Management and Underrepresented Groups and the Division got the chance to sponsor one of the technical networking sessions. There, we talked to passers-by about career development in management and being active in implementing equity and inclusion initiatives in hiring, team composition, and mentorship.

Thanks to the 1,900 people who attended! Find me in line at the virtual coffee bar to celebrate.

// Allyship is Leadership

Got the opportunity to share how allyship of underrepresented groups is just part of how great leaders build the most capable and ambitious teams to get big things done.

My write-up is featured as part of the AIChE ChEnected blog.

// Archiving-in-Place

A fun discovery during my coronavirus shelter-in-place spring cleaning.

Fun fact: did you know Bartlett’s credits Bill Griffith with coining the phrase, “Are we having fun yet?” in 1979? 🤯

// My Most Expensive Material Possession is a Coffee Mug

The time, tuition, and mental wellness that translated into earning this mug when I graduated college is still today easily the most expensive thing that I own. This is a true luxury good. Happy that it has survived multiple moves throughout the country over the years, refusing to shatter even when I have shattered.

// AIChE Annual Meeting - Orlando, Florida (November 2019)

// 57th Annual AIChE Northern California Symposium (April 2019)

As I end my term as Section Chair of the AIChE Northern California Section, my valedictory activity for the section was to organize the Section’s premiere tradition, its annual Symposium, which focuses on a given theme and brings chemical engineers and research scientists together for a full day of topics, workshops, and camaraderie.

// AIChE Spring Meeting in New Orleans (April 2019)

AIChE's industry-centric conference each year is its Spring Meeting, which took place this year in New Orleans. I was there to help out with the AIChE Management Division, which sponsors two days of talks in this spring conference. This season, the main topics were related to career development, continuous improvement and best practices in process safety.

// AIChE Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh (November 2018)

Traveled to Pittsburgh in the fall as a speaker for the Management Division’s sessions on productivity and project management, where my talk introduced the concept of Scrum, common in the tech world and slowly gaining more traction in other industries such as chemical engineering.

// Escape from Bureaucracy

Leading a local non-profit technical society has its challenges, but when your closest allies are talented chemical engineers in their own right, it makes the challenges more fun to overcome. When I collaborate with Meredith & Nate, I am always inspired to up my ChemE game.

// RVA & Virgina Commonwealth Engineering (2017)

Richmond, Virginia is home to Virginia Commonwealth University whose engineering department just celebrated is 20th year in 2016. Had the chance to visit the engineering school at VCU this February, meet up with my long time mentor Ram Gupta, and chat with engineering students as a guest speaker about career development as chemical engineers. 

Even though it was over a decade and a half ago, when I was a newbie process engineering at a battery factory in west Georgia, I tried to keep my link to academia at the time by taking extension classes in chemical engineering at nearby Auburn University. I met Dr. Gupta there for the first time as his student, where we shared a common enthusiasm for a branch of chemical engineering called thermodynamics.  

It's so amazing that all our small conversations and email exchanges over the years have been so influential to me, long after taking my core chemical engineering skills across to other industries. So to stand in his lab and chat with him and his grad students in downtown Richmond was celebratory and surreal. And pretty awesome.

// WE'LL TAKE A CHANCE ON YOU (EVEN THOUGH YOU MAKE US CRAZY)

I owe every instance of anything that could be perceived as success to the mentors throughout my early days as a chemical engineering major at Johns Hopkins. These were largely people who had no business taking a chance on me, but they did and I am truly lucky and grateful. That I have since become good friends with many of them only makes me luckier.

No engineer can aspire to a successful career without patient, empathetic mentors there to get your back. My freshman year advisor Dr. John Van Zanten welcomed me to the chemical engineering department with open arms when I transferred there from the Johns Hopkins Department of English.  He continued to stick with me through the moment I crossed the stage for a diploma even though he had every reason to kick me to the curb early on.

As my career progressed, I kept in touch with some of my key mentors in chemical engineering: coaches, sanity checkers, and (some would argue) charity workers, all who encouraged me to stay the path.

• Dr. Michael Paulaitis taught me about the intersection of biochemistry, proteomics and physical chemistry and ignited my fascination with thermodynamics.

• Dr. Mark McHugh extended my passion for thermodynamics further by teaching me the wild world of phase equilibria. It was also in his class that I learned how to really study chemical engineering.

• Dr. Mike Betenbaugh kept me on the straight and narrow, kicked my butt at regular intervals to keep me focused and ultimately hired me for my first job out of college to partner with a local firm in the design of the Department's new undergraduate chemical engineering lab (I still get teary-eyed whenever I see a box of Swagelok sitting around).

• Dr. Ram Gupta helped me glimpse what chemical engineering research could have been like, let me hang out in his lab at Auburn and pontificate equations of state, and encouraged me that "the best discoveries lie at the interface of different disciplines."

// ChemEng Ephemera

// Pressure Vessel

Over a decade later, this time returning to Johns Hopkins as a speaker and not as a sleep deprived undergraduate, I got a tour of the undergraduate chemical engineering lab in Maryland Hall. To my surprise, this liquid level experiment was still going strong.

As my undergraduate days were winding down and I still had not a clue as to what I wanted to be when I grew up, my mentor Mike Betenbaugh took a chance on me and asked me to take over building out new experiments for the undergraduate lab. So a week or so after graduating, I officially took a job as an engineering aide to the Department of Chemical Engineering, was given a budget, two six inch thick catalogs filled with mysterious lab equipment, and a goal of creating a scaled down lab experiment where chemical engineering students could learn process controls, play with pressure sensors, hook up thermocouples.

My days and nights were long and I largely worked solo, although I had the helpful guidance of a visiting professor who would pop in for encouragement and help me bolt pieces of metal together. These were quiet afternoons with me sitting on the floor with snack-sized boxes of Swagelok surrounding me, shredded pieces of Teflon tape stuck to my clothes.

It eventually worked, we published an operations manual, and I even got my first acknowledgement in a chemical engineering paper.

So it was very much a close the loop experience to return to my school to talk to undergrads about chemical engineering careers and see this ghostly past version of myself still moving along as if I had sleeplessly never left.