(4e) Graduate Education, Creative Problem Solving, and the Legacy of Scott Fogler

Professor Scott Fogler had an illustrious career of over 55 years with contributions spanning from widespread undergraduate texts, hundreds of research articles, and 45 doctoral and 49 master’s student graduates. These accomplishments were the result of a lifelong career dedicated to education. As a doctoral student with Scott, I will forever hold his approach as the gold standard as an educator. Despite the international success of his groundbreaking textbooks on reaction engineering, I witnessed Scott making precise modification to each lecture in preparation for courses he had taught for generations of students. In this talk, I would like to focus on Scott’s contributions to graduate education using lessons from his work on creative problems solving, which is of course accompanied by a rigorous text that underwent three editions. Scott demonstrated a student-centered approach, and throughout a student’s research, Scott promoted creative problem solving. This approach emphasized critical insight on not only the research method, but also on analysis of the underlying questions and assumptions that motivated the work. This method encouraged students to challenge dominant paradigms to uncover novel and transformative research. Scott’s widespread commitment to education produced both compelling scientific research and capable graduates that were prepared to tackle a lifetime of challenges with novelty and rigor.