The 2019 AIChE Annual Meeting took a look at chemical engineers' contributions to innovation with the session Meet the Innovators: Transforming the Future through Chemical Engineering. Venkat Bhethanabotla, Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and Director of the Materials Science and Engineering Program at the University of South Florida, served as this year's Meeting Program Chair. He took a moment at the Annual Meeting to sit down with session speakers Rakesh Agrawal, Jay D. Keasling, and Christine Schmidt, who each address specific areas of innovation in chemical engineering and biological engineering.
Rakesh Agrawal, the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor in the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering at Purdue University, delivered the talk “Chemical Engineering Innovations for a Renewable Economy" at the Meet the Innovators session. Jay D. Keasling, Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering and Department of Bioengineering and Senior Faculty Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, delivered a talk titled “Innovations in Synthetic Biology.” And Christine Schmidt, the J. Crayton Pruitt Family Professor and the Department Chair for the University of Florida Department of Biomedical Engineering, presented “Engineering Materials for Clinical Application.” You can hear from all three speakers in the video above.