 Hello and welcome to today's to today's public briefing on the new national academies of sciences engineering and medicines report new directions for chemical engineering. I'm going to turn it over to Dr john Anderson who is the president of the National Academy of Engineering. Thank you Maggie. First I want to congratulate the, the committee and the staff for just an outstanding job I've really enjoyed going through the report, and I participated in the first meeting to great committee, and the results is expected from such a such an outstanding group, especially in all of what was accomplished because of coven 19. And I understand the first meeting was the only in person meeting, and to have such a report in these difficult conditions is just really admirable so thank you very much. There were two previous reports on the future of chemical engineering that I'm aware of in 1988 the Amundsen report was published the chemical engineering frontiers. And then in 2003 report entitled beyond the molecular frontiers is published by led by committee led by Matt Tyrell and Ronald Breslow. The Amundsen report focused just on chemical engineering mainly and, and a lot of differences I'll get into in a minute here. But what I took away from this report, kind of a high level is the following are the following first scale chemical engineers work over many different scales from molecular to almost geological scales. Secondly, this this report emphasize the collaboration with other fields, the multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of our work. The third is the unit, we must be aware of unattended consequences of our work and learn from history, nice section there on things that appeared to be windfalls for society that ended up having negative consequences. And in the future, we've got to try our best to identify those. And finally, workforce. We have to prepare the workforce for the future, especially with respect to inclusiveness and making sure that the entirety of our society is engaged. For two reasons one is the talent that we need to get will come from all aspects of our society. All elements and, and secondly, the inverse input is needed to get to the right point to go in the right direction. So I'm really pleased to see these emphasize. Now when I compared this report with the Amundsen report I saw some striking differences first in the committee itself the Amundsen report committee had 32 members, only one of them was a woman, and there was no racial diversity at all. The Amundsen report has 18 women, seven women out of 18 members, this committee and it also has a great deal of ethnic and racial diversity. So that's a real plus for this report. The workforce and chemical engineering wasn't emphasized as much in the, in the Amundsen report systems thinking was emphasized here much more than in the enters in the Amundsen report, especially with respect to food water energy nexus sustainability and end of life concerns are present in this report, but somewhat absent in the other. In fact, there are three areas that do that hardly appear don't appear at all on the Amundsen report that are highlighted in this report. One is on climate climate change climate is mentioned once in the Amundsen report. The second is sustainability. It's not mentioned at all, I think in the Amundsen report. This pandemic. And again, not mentioned on the Amundsen report but a focal point here. So that's a real difference and it shows that of course things have changed in the 40 30 plus years since the two reports. The funding of this report is also very interesting with so many different parts over 40 sources of funding, which means there's a lot of skin in the game by a lot of people, and of course should be of interest to a large group of stakeholders. And so I found that to be kind of crowdsourcing funding was kind of a unique aspect that we don't see very much at the national academies. I congratulate Maggie, Walter and her staff, and all the committee members are doing an exceptional job. The path is clearly forward is clearly laid out for us. Now we must execute it. I would like to introduce Eric Kahler the chair of the committee and Eric, we most of us know Eric, but he is served in many leadership roles in academia from Dean provost, President of the University of Minnesota and now president of Case Western Reserve University really want to thank Eric for taking this leadership and such a fine job of working with very talented people to get a great result. And I turn the microphone over to you. Hey, John, thank you, and I appreciate all of you in attendance and my goal here is to walk through the report at obviously a pretty high level, and joined by about 10 of the committee members and we'll have time at the end for some questions that that you may have. The motivation for the study really was found its origin, I think, in a 2016 report from a roundtable that was held at the AICG meeting that year and it really was that the, the field needed a new vision for the 21st century. A need in some sense for a new Amundsen report. As John mentioned, I think that report was published in 1988. This is 2022 so currently we're exhibiting a once every 34 year pace of a comprehensive report like this our field can probably do better than than three a century and it was overdue. I think for us to come together and look at the problems and challenges that we have in front of it. Again, as John mentioned, the community provided support for the study, not quite crowdsourcing but the next slide will show contributions from 45 academic departments to professional societies for federal 12 private sector groups that really does. I think speak to the health of our of our community the health of our profession that so many people would come forward with with resources to execute on what they've received to be an important mission. So the committee was made up initially of the 18 members. Cheryl Taish stepped off in September of 2022 leaving the 17. Six of them have a deep experience in industry, although only two are currently in industry and one of the national lab but Monty Demetrius Enrique sang the tune day in Jose, obviously, and Cheryl deep long careers in industrial research. So we felt the committee was fairly balanced with respect to academic and in industry and balanced in other dimensions as john mentioned. We also thought that we had reasonable coverage of the field with with 17 people it's not possible to blanket a field as diverse as chemical engineering. But I think we did a pretty good job and where we had gaps or or areas of knowledge missing. We reached out to experts in a variety of areas and particularly in respect to electronic materials. We had a formal set of consultants from EMD electronics that provided us with some terrific insight into that field. The report has so far been downloaded about 1700 times and we feel it will have an impact and of course none of this work could have been done without the really spectacular help and guidance of Maggie Walzer and her staff of the National Lab holding us to task keeping us on time and focused extraordinarily a strong effort by by that team. So we have a statement of task which of course we have to have to get to work and it really starts. Oh dear, I'm sorry I forgot a very sad thing. The fact of the report issued our dear friend to Indy Ogonaki passed away. He was an enormously important contributor to this report and a friend and mentor to many of us and we have arranged to dedicate this report to them. So our statement of task was to describe as you might expect what are the advanced advances in chemical engineering, what's changed. Where do we put this field in perspective with respect to society. Obviously there's been enormous technical process in many areas, particularly around big data artificial intelligence sensors, etc. The practice of R&D has changed large industrially sponsored research organizations are now quite rare in chemical engineering and we have evolved into different ways of getting research done. And we really wanted to spend a substantial amount of effort talking about the society factors that have that that have impacted the field, and in particular questions around who gets to be a chemical engineer. So our task was the easy one of predicting the future. We were asked to look over a 10 to 30 year time horizon and really identify challenges and opportunities. Identify existing areas and new areas that are likely to be promising ones for both intellectual growth and research investments, and identify areas where science was missing. We again focused on undergraduate and graduate chemical engineering education and talk about in that section of the report. Some both modest and significant changes to how that part of our business gets done. And finally, and last but not least we were charged with putting some perspective around where United States chemical engineering sits in respect to that around the world. So that was our task and to tackle it, we identified the following approaches. We first talked about the major societal environmental areas in which we could work and you see them listed their energy food and water health and medicine manufacturing materials and tools. I think most anybody listening on this call would generate a list of six topics that that in some sense overlaps considerably with these course we were also informed by conversations around the grand challenges identified by by the National Academy of Engineering and organizations and other organizations. So again, you'll see that play out in the structure of the report, but the initial gathering of information and writing was organized around those topics in addition to to chemical engineering education. So, again, challenges and opportunities new areas really talked about the key challenges, both the positive ones of opportunities, as well as the need to address, particularly some of the environmental impacts of chemical engineering choices and activities of the past. And so again, the topics of energy the energy transition food water and air that nexus health and medicine manufacturing circular economy sustainability and environmental impact and the role chemical engineers play in materials, synthesis and manufacturing. Now, as john mentioned this report was done during cove it, which really presented some interesting challenges but also opportunities we had one in person meeting to kick us off in February of 2020 and then it was virtual. The good news about that is that we had an opportunity to meet more times than we would have had, were we to meet in person, shorter meetings but but more of them. That's probably an efficient way to do some of that work. We also were able to reach out to over 60 guests from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. And again, that's far more many people than we would have been able to talk to in person. 27 of the meetings were had had at least a part open to the public and we took input there as as we got it. We also had a town hall style session at the 2019 Orlando meeting of the ASH and we participated in to virtual session pay I see a virtual local section meetings to get to get input. And we distributed a questionnaire broadly so those are the elements of the input that we took from from our community and begin then to to synthesize into the the following areas which really identify as the chapters at the core of the report and of course, no chemical engineering report I think could could could not lead with the greatest challenge facing our, our planet which is global warming. And then that's necessity for decarbonization of the of energy systems to do a deal with that and and that's right in the wheelhouse chemical engineers obviously equally important perhaps from the longer term the sustainable engineering solutions environmental awareness. Then flexible manufacturing the circular economy, obviously playing directly into that targeted and accessible medicine. We talk a great deal well the public talks a great deal about the breakthrough of of science and medicine in the creation of the coven vaccine and the delivery. What sometimes gets missed is an absolutely central to the coven 19 vaccine response was engineering in particular chemical engineering from understanding live in nano particles to understanding how to make massive numbers of doses and distribute them around the world in an environment that is cold chain limited is an engineering problem and it was solved by engineers. We spend some time thinking about our chemical engineers play the role in in materials of science and engineering broadly. What can we do doing that space. And of course the tool that is likely to have the largest impact on on perhaps engineering in general but chemical engineering in particular is machine learning artificial intelligence managing large data sets and we spend some good amount of time talking about what that future might look like. We have to to grow the next generation of chemical engineers. That generation cannot look like the generation that was before us. We need to reach out more broadly to people from from all backgrounds and welcome them into the engine of chemical engineering. The final chapter is on international leadership and the next group of slides, I will take you through these again at a high level. I will refer you to the report for for details or perhaps to questions at the end. The diagram on on the right part of the slide is of course the call to action for for our society is the increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past 270 years and it doesn't I think need amplification for this audience addressing climate change will require a lot of things but decarbonization of current energy systems is one where chemical engineers play a role. We really must take a lead in the transition from the current energy landscape to one that's based on renewable and sustainable energy sources. Well at the same time trying to reduce the carbon footprint of fossil fuel so that's expanded a little bit on the next slide please. Here we talked about decarbonization in terms of sources, carriers methods of storage use and ultimately then put the potential for carbon capture and use and storage of that of that carbon. And the bullets here are merely illustrative. The report goes into the greater detail but again solar technology shale oil and gas biofuels production investigation of alternatives in particular bio based ones such as Lignan reimagining petroleum refineries. What's the role of clean hydrogen and the role of the different ways to produce hydrogen in fish efficiencies of chemical transformation catalysis breakthroughs at hand there. Chemical engineers play a role in in battery technology and design, particularly for end of life disposal. Clearly, the geopolitical issues around relying on batteries that are made for materials that are mined in countries with with the potential for hostility with the United States not a particularly good long term idea so how do we design batteries that use earth abundant elements. The electric vehicle revolution is is certainly here and large automobile manufacturers identifying a date beyond which they will not make gasoline powered cars. And of course some attention needs to be played to reducing emissions from very large materials and chemical production cement and production in particular is probably knows a huge producer of greenhouse gas. And then carbon capture and use. It will be again an area of engagement by chemical engineering. We then followed with some recommendations for this this section, and you'll see sort of this modality in the rest of the sections as I as I walk through them. So here is the topic is a little illustration and then the recommendations and so here the recommendations are our federal research advancements investments in lower zero carbon energy, photochemistry, water conservation as a resource should be a theme and carbon capture and storage. And again on many of the slides that that follow, you will see a focus on interdisciplinary cross sector collaborations, as we try to bring not only the science and engineering and into existence the laboratory, but also grow up to pilot and ultimately engage scale projects in in many areas and again, I hope what comes out in this report is the dramatic focus on on the boundaries of our discipline the need for interdisciplinary work cross sector work. Not everybody knows all that we need to do to advance on these we're going to need teams of people collaborating you'll see that in many places. Next was the environmental system challenge, the untangling of the so called food energy food water energy nexus the the inter connections of the management of those three resources and of course the energy conversation we just had is tightly wound into this. Next slide, suggest some sustainable engineering solutions for environmental systems. And again, these are begin on our report to get a little bit granular. Frankly where where we think it really is some some low hanging fruit to be done advanced separations and treatment technologies for for water, you know on the fundamental issues of understanding the structure of water. There's a lot of ions and in charge surfaces. We feel fundamental science advances there which would be done on the United States largely by people in chemical engineering departments and academics would have great benefit. We think there are good chemical engineering problems related to the management of food improving yield. Ammonia production of course, in a real sense, generated the green revolution and is responsible for millions of people being alive. It is also incredibly energy intensive and as a big environmental footprint, how what else can we do in air pollution emission of course but also continuing work pioneered by chemical engineers and understanding the fundamental aspects of of aerosols. And again, we make investment recommendations. Again, as I mentioned structure and dynamics of water separation technologies. And again, here we can be a little more specific about the kind of interdisciplinary cross sector collaborations, whether it's in metabolic engineering, a process of bioprocess development. And the ideas that you read here really provide fertile ground to no pun intended for chemical engineers to to interact with with bioscientists and others around these opportunities. Next we turned our attention to engineering targeted and accessible medicine. Here's an example of of actually a paper by Dundee around process modeling for complex biological systems and we really in this section organized things around personalized medicine, which this would be an example, improving therapeutics understanding the biome, the opportunities for materials devices and delivery delivery, and even for something that seems so prosaic as hygiene but for example, they are understanding the time scale for airborne airborne suspension of aerosols would be helpful. Maggie is running the slides very quickly for me. We then talked about first improving therapeutics. And there we thought, for example, a predictive approach to vaccine subunit selection using data mining machine learning to provide some breakthroughs for vaccines. There's the discovery far more rapidly than we do now. Next engineering targeted and accessible medicine in particular the idea of computational approaches to enable predictive capabilities or predicting capabilities of specific signaling pathways would be would be an option. So the next slide, please Maggie, and then the one after that we're ready for. So materials devices and deliveries the opportunity in particular to create and understand non invasive methods are very minimally invasive methods for that drug delivery. Again, chemical engineers work in this area opportunities available to expand. And the next slide is again, federal research investment in that area by molecular engineering personalized medicine devices systems and synthetic biology field in which chemical engineers immediately can feel at home and make contributions. And of course a constant focus on cost and health equity. Again, here the theme you're beginning to see reappear again and again interdisciplinary cross sector collaborations to drive pilot and demonstration scale, scale processes. Next was a flexible the idea of flexible manufacturing in the circular economy. The idea that we take feedstock sources whether they'd be by a vast municipal or oils from from plants or fats treat those that create the feedstocks that you see there. And then using biological or chemical transformation produce some materials either intermediate for final products for for application so being able to produce that spectrum of final or intermediate products from a range of sources in a flexible way. We feel offers real opportunities particularly as we evolve from a petroleum based economy. Process intensification the next slide please emerge as an opportunity in several areas this particular example is reactive distillation. In an example in the electronics industry is a way to reduce waste materials improve efficiency, allow some just in time manufacturing the variety of other flexible. And the circular economy. Again, we focused on ways that chemical engineers would would want to read redesign processes so as to reduce waste dreams, improve opportunities for for upcycling and and again, allowing our industry our society to have a smaller environmental footprint. So we then again talk about research investment and we get some pretty specific examples I think based by by a good set of facts on areas that that we felt would be would be important process intensification for example as well as the others that you can read. And again here are the interdisciplinary collaborations both on on scale down and scaled out processes again smaller scale processes generating very minimal waste and area of further investigation. So next we turned our attention to some materials for the 21st century, and this is an area in which a group, not this group, a different group, could write an entire report in and of itself and in fact those there are some recent ones that that exists so we felt it appropriate for us to visit not comprehensively but in areas where we thought the chemical engineers knowledge of a process and molecules and products would would be a most use sort of the the the processing synthesis point of view. And in that we talked about really five specific areas polymer science and engineering complex fluids and soft materials nanoparticles biomaterials and electronic materials and so. And for example, the polymer synthesis polymer area we could think about moving from from simple sequences that we're, we can make an laboratory to increasing complexity while at the same time learning from highly complex molecules like proteins and back engineering how they fold and generate the properties that make them useful and begin to merge in the middle with computation in large data sets and begin to be able to predict from fundamental sequencing what the final material property would be. For example, I'll give us biomaterials which, again, is an example here in the in the illustration of the ability of using bio matrices and in gels to repair tissues and organs would same time provide for drug delivery wound repair and tissue generation perhaps all in one kind of a process. And again, the federal and industry but research investment in these areas, we think we're pretty well justified. Finally, the tools chapter the next slide is the last of the hardware if you will. So I think a very revealing slide. This is a count of a I C H E meeting abstracts with various terms related to data science so we thought the the appearance of various terms and a I C H E abstracts would give us a reasonably good measure of what chemical engineers were interested in. And if you look here, broken out our machine learning neural network artificial intelligence deep learning and data science. And you see in until about 2015 or so, relatively modest, there may be mentioned 50 times. And now by the time you get to 2020 a mere five years later, all of those terms are mentioned nearly 400 times so eight times as much interest in these fields, measured by this metric which may or may not like is this pretty and pretty indicative of what we're seeing across the field that that these areas of artificial intelligence and its fellow travelers are certainly growing in importance. And again, part of that will be improving modeling and simulation lifecycle assessment capabilities using these tools, as well as feeding these large data sets with novel instrumentation and and sensors which are coming more ubiquitous and available at lower and lower cost. And then we turned our attention next to training and fostering the next generation of chemical engineers and we as a field must become more diverse and more welcoming to people from diverse backgrounds and this is a little data that shows you over a 10 year period, the percentage of awarded to women in engineering overall, which is the lower green bar to biomedical engineering, which is the tallest red orange bar that's the largest in the engineering fields in chemical engineering in the blue bar and you see really two takeaways from this one is that the percentage of degrees given to women in chemical engineering is larger than that for engineering overall, but it stayed stubbornly at around 33% all degrees bachelors masters and and PhD for a long time. So to the degree that we think we're moving the dial on increasing gender diversity and chemical engineering, we're not. The next slide shows data. So for the percentage of chemical engineering award degrees awarded to black indigenous and people's color. BIPOC population, and again from 2008 to 2018, the percent of bachelors awarded masters awarded absolutely flat lines, no change in improvement of diversity over 10 years in our field. So the percentage of PhDs you see fluctuates and partly that's the sad fact of your dealing with us with the statistic of small small numbers. And so a difference of one or two individuals actually moves that line. Again, I don't know that you need any more evidence than that about the urgent need for our field to be more diverse and welcoming. So the next slide begins to interface or identify rather some of the ideas that could could help us in this space. They break into curriculum revisions in general and then ways to attract more women and lack of digital people of color to our fields. The curriculum revisions. Again, you know, we talked about these we recognize the tyranny of 120 credits, the idea that if we take something, put something in we have to take something out we we got that. But some of the key ideas that emerged were working from a pedagogical point of view to make more connections across the core disciplines. And so to not teach fluid mechanics or kinetics in a silo, but rather to try to make connections between them, and to do that as soon in the curriculum as we could because of the, the need to catch the interest in and attract and retain students. Pretty much everyone we talked to as a visitor to our committee sooner or later got around to the fact that experiential learning. What's an important thing that we should do better, whether that's internships or other methods can be determined but we need more hands on experience, both in in the academic influence and out of it. We also thought that the opportunity to create a little space could be bringing math and statistics out of the math department and into the core and teaching teaching what our students need to know but perhaps not much more than that in the core. In terms of attracting other students. We really think our field needs to talk very much more about the opportunities chemical engineers have to impact society. The difference that we can make in human lives. We need more effective mentoring and supporting structures for all students but a particular students who are not in the majority. We also felt that we as a field leave closed what could be an important pipeline to our field by the fact that most of our curricula are restricted to the to at least the final two years. If not many with with key courses taught in the sophomore year and some with courses taught in the freshman year. The latter two of those really eliminate eliminate the ability to attract transfer students who would earn a two year degree somewhere and then transfer to to our program to chemical engineering and we have some ways to to enable that effectively. We think and they're explored in the report. Turning next to graduate students. Again, we really thought carefully about moving away from the sort of siloed mentor mentee. I think I'm a student working on my project thesis to something that's broader and allows some internships allows coordination among university industry and funding agencies from the AIC HE to create an experience that was those more similar to what they might find in an industrial environment and might actually prepare them better more broadly for a research career if that's where they want to go. And to attract more people of different experiences. We really think it's it's important to think about how we revise admissions criteria to remove artificial barriers that we put in place to to really narrow the lens through which we look. And an additional way is to be more purposeful about welcoming students who have undergraduate degrees and disciplines that are not chemical engineering disciplines that have larger fractions of women or students of color that I think could quite easily prosper and chemical engineering. So in terms of recommendations here, we thought that universities and AIC HE is a convener could build and share curated chemical engineering content that would be accepted by all chemical engineering and departments and if we did that for the entry level courses that are taught times in the sophomore year, those could be taken remotely by students at two year colleges and enable them to enter the curriculum on time. And then we do think this is worthy of substantial more conversation. So we are in favor of convening a summit focused on technology enabled learning innovations like I'm talking about here in ways to really try to look around more about what the future of chemical engineering education and chemical engineering people would be. So our final topic was international leadership and I'll be very brief here. It's very clear by by by the data and the data in this plot shows the number of publications in chemical engineering and bend into five year increments from 1981. And the blue bar that is dominant in the first five sectors are contributions from the United States. The bar that is now dominant in the past five immediately past five years by a lot is Asia, and that's largely driven by outputs from China. And it's a direct consequence of large investments in R&D that the Chinese government has made the advantage of this in some real sense is that if you want to know what the Chinese plan is. I'll simply tell you what their plan is in science and engineering and and it's clearly having a very big impact on their work in fields that are that are called chemical engineering. So again, we think the approach there is to make research investments across the board and chemical engineering is discussed in a report to support international collaborations to support us researchers connecting to points of strength in other countries. We felt I think it's fair to say that most of those international collaborations are grassroots originated their faculty to faculty interactions and supporting that growth and the movement of students in the collaboration would be the best way to enable our future success on the national playing field. I know, as I say that we're witnessing a war in central Europe so I don't mean to be naive about the geopolitics of this but the data here speaks to itself. So that's the last of my prepared talks I appreciate all of you attending. I'd be delighted now to open it to some questions. I think there's a Q&A icon at the bottom of your zoom on the far right and if you type your, your questions into there, I will see those I think yes, and then I will I will summarize the question and then ask individuals to to respond. So the first question from Taysock Moon interdisciplinary field different than when it began. Yeah, I can perspective on this point. You know I really think, you know, we'll touch on it throughout here it's woven throughout our report. The need for interdisciplinary approaches to to all of our problems. Does the report provide guidance from a broader systems approach regarding the energy water carbon nexus appropriate applications geological carbon sequestration requires large pipeline systems. Yeah, and so there is some some discussion in the report about a variety of carbon sequestration challenges and again, you know, part of our, our charge was to actually not do original research so we cited both opportunities and challenges there. And I think the reader can can build on those to to going to go forward there. Anyone else on the committee want to address that. That question while we're here I Rachel you took the lead on some of the energy food water questions. When I add or amplify Well, only to say that there is a chapter on food energy water nexus with exactly the understanding that that's being asked for in the question that frequently one solution to one, one portion of the triangle comes with significant costs to the others, and the chemical engineering systems approach in combination with civil engineering and other systems level approaches is very necessary to untangle all of this. Then the question from Adam Jones. You see other funders active in the space such as philanthropy or venture capitalism. Do recommendations to identify foster connections between basic research policy and market forces. I think venture capital will certainly play a role. It does already that innumerable number of of startup companies that have emerged primarily from from university research and chemical engineering. Already, we talked to do a couple of beliefs of people at that early stage so I think you'll see venture play a role there. It is, you know, it's a different kettle of fish than making an app right because you generally need some built infrastructure, laboratory equipment, etc. So, so the entry point there for for venture or angel investment is different that it is in the software industry but it is there and I think it'll grow. And I think all of us in the academic world rely on private philanthropy to some degree to support research activities and that's there. You know, do I see a big play. Chan Zuckerberg Foundation has put a call out for a $200 million great big idea to solve. And I think you could easily find problems and solutions that center in chemical engineering that would be competitive for those kinds of things so I see that anybody else I don't want to hog the question answering so if anyone on the committee would like to jump in please just do it. Eric, this is and Robinson I was also going to mention the, the manufacturing USA groups have been helping to bridge that divide it's it's kind of half industry funded half federal funded and I can't remember the name of the one that's associated with a I see he I apologize, but I do remember the biotechnology one which is nimble. There's also a number of other ones but those I think are are helping with those partnerships. I think that's that's true and nimble and us a manufacturing or programs that are USA manufacturing to program supported at nest and nimble is a is a very large center for them and it's at the University Delaware and led by a chemical engineer so they're there. We can be everywhere in that, in that space. Just saying here. Yeah, and thank you for volunteering would you want to talk about the challenges of diversifying why why we failed and. Sure, it's a topic that's certainly a great interest to many of us now and and and for a while I think I think there's two things that that people have identified. And, and one is engineering as a as a whole not just chemical engineering needs to do a better job marketing ourselves as a problem solvers for the world there's there's a lot of data some is anecdotal but some is the surveys which entering entering don't always get exposed to engineering and and when they do that they see the the accidents and that's particularly true for for women and students of color is that they don't don't see us as problem solvers so that's something that that we as a whole need to work on the other problem is is. Really addressing some of the, the social economic challenges where, again that pairing and getting a connection to community colleges I think will help with the transition. That that's highlighted in the report and I think that will continue to be a potential future avenue. Anyone else want to address that. This is Rachel, I leap in. I'm going to wear a Gilda Barberino hat just for a second, because she's not here anymore. The way she framed a lot of this was thinking about who gets to be a chemical engineer. And we have one challenge with that. Very much so because there's not a high school class called chemical engineering. And so even just people choosing a major is already a huge filter. And so this is a big part of the marketing and also our thinking about connections community colleges marketing ourselves within our own campuses. Which is not something that we've thought about in the past is an important part of diversifying our discipline. Great, thank you. Question of the topic or the diversity it's a matter of attraction or retention or both, but clearly both. Between math and statistics motivation for this that are Kimmy students are not getting good enough instruction or they're getting too much irrelevant unnecessary math. I think it's it's a little bit of both. I think again, you know, we're asking a hard question which is how do you create more space in the undergraduate chemical engineering curriculum. You know, a answer is to streamline and improve the utility of the math education that that our students get. There's the other side of the coin, which says math should be taught by mathematicians chemistry by chemists. No matter expert should should teach the subject that's I think a pretty valid point of view as all it's suspect it's probably going to be a local solution. You know, I tend a little bit to, to appreciate experts teaching experts you don't necessarily want the the ag school to teach the history of the horse but it may be in some places that that is a real opportunity in in math. A significant part of a presentation systems, AI, etc. The bottom line is yet we don't see growth of those areas in in research groups and the short answer to that is follow the money. So if the recommendations that we've made are followed up by funding agencies and there's increased research support available. I think you'll see people evolve their research areas into and investigation of those kinds of problems again bringing in perhaps people trained in those disciplines and other fields and applying their knowledge to the chemical engineer. I think it's maybe I'll ask Sharon. Lots of her she's still here to weigh in on that but I think she'll tell you that a, it's much better to take a chemical engineering train them and something about data science and it is take a data scientist and teach her chemical engineering but Sharon I don't, I can't see you on this tiny screen. I don't want to amplify that we're not and don't need to put. I'm sorry I was looking for the mute button, the unmute button. Yes, indeed. I mean, we, we, it's, you know, data science, AI machine learning is swept over everything. It's sweeping through chemical engineering and, and, you know, students are, are, you know, voting with their feet to learn, you know, all of these new ideas in, in, in AI and data science. There are just extraordinary opportunities to be had in all of the engineering and science disciplines from applying these new, new techniques, but our current curriculum really doesn't doesn't reflect that. And we hear from so many employers that in chemical, you know, chemical companies and other companies that regularly employ chemical engineers that it's very hard for them to hire data scientists who want to do chemical engineering research they just want to do data science research and it really doesn't matter so much what what it's on but they don't bring that necessary disciplinary knowledge that a chemical engineer would have. And so, in the report touches on how we need to find a way to integrate these topics into chemical engineering curriculum, both at the graduate and undergraduate level. Anyone else from the committee on this topic. Just, I'll just follow up it's tremendous energy and faculty search committees are all focusing on this as a real groundswell. And every major grant that's attacking a problem for multiple viewpoints is including these kinds of approaches. So I really think that it's going to be a self healing issue that the person's brought up. Yeah, maybe another comment, Eric, and that is at least at a graduate level were training increasing numbers of chemical engineers that are well versed in machine learning data science. But we lose them, we lose them to other industries that are paying large sums of money and and frankly presenting some very interesting problems so we need to do something to keep them in engineering one that to grow in strength, particularly in the industry. Great. One question is to paraphrase the breadth is fine but some complex problems need depth and so you know the idea at least at the graduate level that you would have a T shaped curriculum where you would go pretty broad and understand the issues in different disciplines but then you go deep the stock of the T in the area of particular expertise that you want to develop so you need. You certainly do need true experts in particular in particular fields but they I think and I think it's fair to say the committee things that will be working in an interdisciplinary cross disciplinary teams more and more often to work on the real problems that are in front of us. Alexander Alex rock good. Breaking down barriers between chemical engineering and adjacent fields from funding perspective there's still some delineations. I think that's true I think they're going to go away. I think they are going away and I think they will continue to go away and again that's sort of the drum beat theme of this report is is the need for interdisciplinary. Tom Deegan, a lot of names I know here. Is there any granularity around the topics that the Chinese chemical engineering research publications are highlighting, or are they similar to us ones. That's a great question and I'm embarrassed that I don't think I know the answer to that I don't think we've looked with enough detail to actually see unless someone on the committee wants to throw me a lifeline here. Okay. Great question. I think the answer is we didn't look at that. Right. We did not look at but it would be a very interesting thing to look at. I suspect that the topics will be very similar. I suspect to but it would be. That's a good question. We don't know. Some parts of the curriculum must be omitted. Can you indication what that might be beyond the math simplification. I think it's fair to say that we summarize that what we may see is some departments beginning to look more necessarily narrow, well narrower and not teach everything about everything to everybody. But again, I think that's going to be local, a local evolution rather than, than a top down element. I also see as the last recommendation and in the education part, the idea of this summit. We spent a fair amount of time talking about and some of the conversation made it to the report. You know, the roles of education technology distance learning, asynchronous education, etc, are going to be an important part of the future. And so that probably offers opportunities for for innovation for for compression of curricular items that that could make space for some, some more things. This was a subject dear to Monty's heart. And I'll offer you the chance Monty if you want to weigh in on that topic a little bit. Yeah, building on some of your comments Eric. This has been a big subject of discussion at the ICHE. ICHE just created the new Institute for Learning and Innovation. And this institute is to be a bridge between the university and the workplace, and to have shared practices and content and use this as a bridge for things that can be shared, not just across universities but across the range, and thinking both in the area of both education, as well as research and new innovation programs. Thank you. I'll go for technologists in the chemistry area growing chemical technology, chemical engineering technology programs, community and technical colleges. That's not a topic that we really explored very much at all that might be an opportunity but we did not. We did not talk about that. Can I have one comment on that one Eric. Sure. It's also been a subject debated a discussion to ICHE the most popular course in the ICHE Academy is chemical engineering for non chemical engineers. And so there's been a lot of discussion about how we make a chemical engineering concepts much more accessible and broad based including community colleges and you know reach out to other disciplines as well. That would be a great venue for the ICHE to explore that question. Thank you. Well, we are at five o'clock we promised you an hour presentation and I'm just running my eye down the other questions. Maggie, are there are the ones that I missed here that we should pick up. There's one that I would like you to cover is that whether there's any concern about the faculty of the future having less industrial experience. It's commonplace today for people to go from PhD to postdoc to academia. You know, we didn't articulate that in any great detail, partly because as I pointed out at the beginning five or six of our committee members had had substantial careers in in industry before coming to two academics. That pipeline does does still work and I suspect it's not going to close off. And even, you know individuals I'll use my own example even though I didn't work in a industrial environment. I had a very engaged consulting activity so I saw lots of lots of very relevant engineering issues in industry and worked on them and brought some of those back into my research topics. So we did not identify that as a strong concern. That's fair to say maybe someone else wants to weigh on that would be fine. And another way to potentially mitigate that is for industries to sponsor more research at universities, and this also goes back to the government earlier. The federal agencies are dominating the funding currently compared to philanthropy and BC, and that's a growth opportunity. The ability to solve problem is related to the amount of funding. So, more of the media. Yeah, that's very, that's a very good point. Thank you. Okay, I think that's it for question times and thank you Eric will now give you a break and let you get a glass of water. I want to thank everyone in the audience for joining us today. And if you haven't already I've dropped a link to download the report in the chat box. So you can download that there. And thanks for joining us.