NSERC discovery grants and a tribute to Leo A. Behie

Abstract

Abstract The scope of chemical engineering continues to evolve and has become ever more multifaceted. It encompasses traditional fields like polymers, thermodynamics, transport processes, control, and environmental science, but has expanded to include biotechnology, biomedical, food technology, materials, and numerical techniques like artificial neural networks and discrete element methods. In fact, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) combines chemical engineering and materials in the same evaluation group to award competitive funding for the Discovery Grant. Prof. Leo Behie's career reflected the change in the scope of chemical engineering. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Prof. Behie's research included hydrodynamics of fluidized beds and deriving the kinetics of the Claus reaction. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, he contributed to biotechnology. In the 2000s and 2010s, his areas of expertise related to biomedical engineering comprising stem cell research and a focus on Parkinson's and Huntington's diseases. The common denominator for most of his research was reactor technology. In 2014, Prof. Behie quipped that chemical engineering was dead and many North American departments shared this tenet and added various scientific fields to recognize the emerging synergies. Here, we show that chemical engineering is a vibrant and growing field. We demonstrate in what way it is changing and describe how NSERC evaluates research dossiers for the Discovery Grants. We describe the relationship between the h index and the number of citations and confirm that bibliometrics has only a minor role in the Discovery Grant award.

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