2018 Symposium Keynote Address

We are delighted to announce that Cristina Thomas, Senior Technical Leader, 3M, will be delivering the keynote address at this year's symposium titled "3M Science: Combining 46 Core Technologies to Improve Daily Life".

Currently, Dr. Thomas is a Senior Technical Leader within the Corporate Research and Development (R&D) organization. Her team is responsible for providing services to the R&D community at 3M, including knowledge discovery and analytics, global technical learning and collaboration, government R&D contracts, and laboratory environmental, health and safety.

As a company, 3M applies science in collaborative ways to improve lives daily and develop solutions to help address world problems and help customers be successful with their businesses.  3M invents and commercializes products that serve a myriad of markets.

3M Science: Combining 46 Core Technologies to Improve Daily Life

Cristina Thomas, Senior Technical Leader, 3M

At 3M, we are rooted in scientific exploration and discovery made possible by our four fundamental strengths. These fundamental strengths allow us every day to apply, commercialize and manufacture new technologies globally. Our strengths in technology and manufacturing are very relevant to the topic of the AIChE 2018 Process Development Symposium.

This keynote will illustrate how, by combining and connecting 46 core technology platforms, 3M researchers and engineers contribute to our customers’ objectives, improve lives and help their customers to succeed. Our materials and processing technologies are utilized by world-class scientists and engineers to invent, build and sell products across our global network.

This talk will focus on how we draw on our curiosity and discovery to apply science to impact the world. We not only invent products, but also are able to make them in our plants enabled by sophisticated processing and capability technologies. I will also touch on the organization that I lead, 3M's Corporate Research and Development (R&D) Services Center, that provides essential services to the organization. These functions include knowledge discovery and analytics, global technical learning and collaboration, and laboratory environmental, health and safety support. All of these services contribute to connecting and combining technologies in general, and to the application of processing technologies in particular. I will also briefly speak to the passion that R&D leaders experience in leading organizations that draw on science, that move new technologies and new product platforms into markets; and the rewards of seeing the fruits of hands-on hard work commercialized.