Ecolab Advances AIChE's Initiatives to Promote Safety and Diversity in the Engineering Workforce

The American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) has announced a major funding commitment from Ecolab, a global leader in water, hygiene and energy technologies and services, in support of two priority initiatives of the AIChE Foundation’s “Doing a World of Good” campaign. Ecolab is affirming its commitment to a safer and more inclusive chemical industry workforce through its partnership with the AIChE Foundation, which focuses on projects that bring chemical engineering expertise to bear for the good of society.

Ecolab will help underwrite the expansion of AIChE’s Undergraduate Process Safety Learning Initiative, a global effort to ensuring that all chemical engineering students entering the workforce possess a working knowledge of process safety principles —  an area of instruction currently underdeveloped in most undergraduate chemical engineering curricula.

Ecolab also is an early leader of the campaign’s most recent undertaking — All for Good: Engineering for Inclusion — which addresses the unique challenges women and other under-represented groups face in the workforce. Through Ecolab’s partnership with AIChE and other industry leaders, AIChE will develop a coordinated range of programs — from the classroom to the boardroom and in between — to attract and retain the best engineering talent from all backgrounds.

In announcing AIChE’s partnership with Ecolab, AIChE Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer June Wispelwey thanked the company for its sponsorship and for joining the Founders’ Circle of organizations funding AIChE’s Undergraduate Process Safety Learning initiative. She expressed her appreciation to Ecolab on behalf of the AIChE Foundation for sharing AIChE’s vision of a chemical engineering profession that champions inclusion and diversity as one of its bedrock principles. “Chemical engineering has always been at the forefront in welcoming underrepresented and under-served groups,” said Wispelwey. “However, there is much more we can accomplish and so much more for the STEM professions to gain by incorporating the contributions of the widest possible community of problem-solvers, thinkers, and innovators.”

Commenting on behalf of Ecolab, Dr. Larry Berger, Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, said that the collaboration with AIChE “reflects our company’s desire to help shape the future of the chemical engineering profession to ensure it has the talent and ability to help solve the world’s most pressing challenges today and in the future.”

For more information about the work of the AIChE Foundation, visit www.aiche.org/giving.