UC Santa Barbara chemical engineering professor Michael Doherty, the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Chair in Process Systems Engineering, delivered the prestigious P.V. Danckwerts Memorial Lecture during the annual joint meeting of the European Congress of Chemical Engineering (ECCE) and the European Congress of Applied Biotechnology (ECAB) in September 2021. The lecture, as well as the conference, took place virtually as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic
Doherty’s research focuses on process systems engineering, with particular interest on crystal engineering for product and process design, and separation with chemical reaction. His lecture is entitled “Practice and Science in Continuous Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals.” Click here to watch a recording of the presentation. He discusses how a recent push toward continuous manufacting has called for more insights and action from chemical engineers. Doherty explains that the transition from batch to continuous manufacturing has provided a vehicle to showcase the impact of work flows and technology development via digital design of drug products and manufactuing processes.
The annual lectureship was established in 1985 to honor Peter V. Danckwerts as a leading scholar in the field of chemical engineering and for his contributions as an executive editor of Chemical Engineering Science. He served as the Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Cambridge and was a past president of the Institution of Chemical Engineers. The Danckwerts Lecture is co-sponsored by Chemical Engineering Science, the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE), the AIChE, and the European Federation of Chemical Engineering (EFCE), and is presented in alternating years at the ECCE (odd years) and AIChE (even years) annual meetings. Doherty was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge when Danckwerts served as head of the Chemical Engineering Department.
After teaching at the University of Minnesota and the University of Massachusetts, Doherty joined the faculty at UCSB in 2000 and served as department chair from 2008 to 2013. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Doherty was named by American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) one of “One Hundred Chemical Engineers of the Modern Era,” and has received AIChE’s Alpha Chi Sigma Award for Chemical Engineering Research. He holds six patents, published more than 200 technical papers and given more than 250 invited lectures. Last November, he delivered the 2020 AIChE Prausnitz Institute Lecture during the annual conference. Click here to watch the AIChE presentation.
