2017 Industry Leaders Forum, Advancing Diversity & Inclusion

On Thursday, November 30^th the AIChE Foundation held its Corporate Council and Industry Leaders Forum to address the most pressing challenges facing the chemical engineering profession. 

The forum, its third to date, was hosted by BASF at their Houston office and brought together more than a dozen industry leaders from the chemical, agricultural, manufacturing and other engineering industries to focus on diversity and inclusion in the chemical engineering profession. 

S. Shariq Yosufzai, AIChE Foundation Board of Trustees, Chair; Vice President of Global Diversity at Chevron, opened the meeting by welcoming the industry leaders. AIChE Executive Director, June Wispelwey, gave an overview of AIChE’s reach to attendees and reiterated why AIChE is the global home of chemical engineering professionals. 

A Round Table discussion followed with, BASF, Chevron, The Dow Chemical Company and Ecolab sharing their respective best practice initiatives with the forum. These recruitment, retention and development programs are scalable and could be adopted by other companies seeking to enhance their own diversity and inclusion efforts.

Upon review of the information presented, the forum’s members identified potential areas for future collaboration to impact diversity and inclusion as an industry imperative. 

The forum concluded with a broad commitment to collectively develop initiatives through AIChE that address industry-wide D&I practices focused on talent acquisition and retention of women and minorities and establish the chemical engineering profession as the leader in tackling these societal issues.