ASIA-PACIFIC JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERINGAsia-Pac. J. Chem. Eng. 2007; 2: 413–414Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI:10.1002/apj.088

EditorialSpecial issue contributions from the Department ofChemical and Materials Engineering, The University ofAuckland

Dr Brent Young joined the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Aucklandas a Senior Lecturer in January 2006. Brent was previously an Associate Professor in Chemical and PetroleumEngineering at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada (1998–2005) and he is now an Adjunct AssociateProfessor. Prior to this, he was a Lecturer (1991–1996) and then Senior Lecturer (1996–1998) in ChemicalTechnology at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He received his B.E. (1986) and Ph.D. (1993)degrees in Chemical and Process Engineering from the University of Canterbury. His teaching and researchinterests centre on process control and design. He is a registered professional engineer and a Fellow of theIChemE. He is actively involved in applied research and industrial consulting. Brent has taught and practicedin New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Dr Darrell Alec Patterson is currently a lecturer in Chemical and Materials Engineering at the Universityof Auckland, New Zealand, having joined the Department in August 2005. He completed his B.E. at theUniversity of Auckland (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001) on the wet air oxidation of surfactant wastewatersand postdoctoral research (2003–2005) on catalytic chiral reactions combined with membrane separationsboth at Imperial College, London. In between these research roles, he worked at WS Atkins Water in theUnited Kingdom as a Project Manager and Technology Development Consultant (2001–2003). His teachingand research interests centre on green process technologies, in particular membrane fabrication and novelmembrane separations, catalytic reaction engineering, and enhanced advanced oxidations for waste andwastewater remediation.

Professor Xiao Dong Chen was born in 1965 in Beijing, China. He received his Bachelor of Engineeringin Engineering Thermophysics in 1987 from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and was awarded his PhD inChemical and Process Engineering from the University of Canterbury New Zealand in 1991. Dong had workedat New Zealand Dairy Research Institute for 2 1

2 years. In late 1993, he was appointed as a lecturer at theUniversity of Auckland and in 1998, he was promoted to associate professor and a full professor (PersonalChair) in 2001. He was elected to Fellow of Royal Society of New Zealand in the year 2000, Fellow ofIChemE in 2001 and was the recipients of the Shedden Uhde Medal (1999), Royal Society Cooper Medal(2002), Hood Fellowship (2005) and Nanqiang Lectureship (2005). Dong has published well over 240 journalpapers and over 160 refereed conference papers in the areas of food processing, chemical engineering andbiochemical engineering. He was the Professorial Principal of Food Engineering at the Riddet Centre ofExcellence for Food Research in NZ. He is a company director for Freezcon NZ Ltd based in Auckland.Since mid-April 2006, he has moved to Monash University to serve as the Chair of Biotechnology and FoodEngineering, based in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Most recently he was awarded the 2006Inaugural Fonterra Award, for his outstanding achievement in practical and commercialisation of food andbiological engineering research in Australasia. He is also now the Associate Dean International for the Facultyof Engineering at Monash, Adjunct Professors at Auckland and China Agricultural University. He teachesHeat and Mass Transfer and Biochemical Engineering at Monash.

The Department of Chemical and Materials Engineer-ing is one of the most research-intensive departments atthe Faculty of Engineering which has had talented for-mer staff and students including the notables Professor

Roy Sharp, who is the current VC of Canterbury Uni-versity, and many industry leaders including Dr MervJones, CEO of the consulting company URS Pacificin Australia, Dr Colin Adam, former head of CSIRO,

2007 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

414 EDITORIAL Asia-Pacific Journal of Chemical Engineering

Australia, Dr Peter Munro, Distinguished Researcherwith Fonterra, New Zealand, Dr Peter Lee, former VicePresident of Research of International Paper Company,USA and now CEO of UniServices Ltd, Auckland,Dr Klaus Moller, a former Vice President with NorskeSkog, Norway and Vice President of STFI (the top pulpand paper research centre in Stockholm), and John Cut-ler of America’s cup fame.

In the first New Zealand-wide Performance BasedResearch Fund (PBRF) Review, the Department ofChemical and Materials Engineering stood out as third-equal among all 228 departments in all tertiary insti-tutions around the country including humanities. Theywere equal-first in New Zealand in the Engineering,Technology and Science sectors. In the most recent(2006) PBRF review, the Department improved itsnational research standing. With an average score of7.3, it is the top research department at the univer-sity of Auckland (next score was 6.6), sole first in theEngineering, Technology and Science sectors and nowsecond overall in all university departments in the coun-try.

The number of the staff members at the Depart-ment of Chemical and Materials Engineering has beenaround 12–14 over the years. Usually, half are on thematerial science and engineering side and half are inthe process engineering area. The department has hadvery strong research focus in metallurgical engineering,light metal processing technology in particular, and hasnow, included rather ambitious programs in ceramicsand nano-materials. The department hosts the ResearchCentre of Surface Science on behalf of the Universityand is well equipped with the latest microscopes andworld-class expertise in conducting these analyses.

It was the pleasure and indeed the honour of thedepartment to have had the opportunity to host Chemecafor the second time. The papers collected in this specialissue are the ones selected from what were presented atthe Chemeca meeting at Auckland, September 2006, butauthored or co-authored by staff members from Chem-ical and Materials Engineering Department. Some have

had significant works done on them since the confer-ence. This is a small sample of what the department iscurrently engaged in. We hope this issue will be usefulto the readers of the journal.

In this issue, Smith and Hossain have described astudy on extraction and recovery of Penicillin G usinga hollow fibre system. This system has been shown tobe effective for a number of valuable extraction opera-tions in the past by the same group. Currie et al . haveexamined a simple procedure to process seashells fora special environmental purpose. Emanuelsson et al .have presented a series of examples about how a chem-ical engineering researcher deals with microbiology andindeed more importantly how the techniques in micro-biology can be applied into engineering analysis (atwo-way thing). Gin and Farid, Liu et al . have demon-strated how well the carbon electrodes perform in ohmicheating of meat patties where the corrosion can be of amain concern. A critical review on the types of the feedstocks which can be used for production of biodieselhas been provided by Behzadi and Farid. In the mate-rials area, also, Hung et al . have described an in situESEM study on partial melting and precipitation pro-cess; Namboothiri et al . have given a review on processoptions for aluminium product. Wu and Ferguson havereported a simulation study of age hardening of alloys.In the process engineering aspects, Montelongo et al .have discussed an Exergy calculator too for processsimulation, and Patel et al . have illustrated what canbe done with an ink-jet spray dryer and the possiblescale-up options.

As special issue editors, we are grateful to all ourcontributing colleagues of this issue and we appreciatethe opportunity given to us by the journal editors.

Brent Young, Darrell Patterson and Xiao Dong Chen*Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, The

University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand∗Now associated with Department of Chemical Engineering,

Monash University, Clayton Campus, Victoria, AustraliaE-mail: dong.chen@eng.monash.edu.au

2007 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Asia-Pac. J. Chem. Eng. 2007; 2: 413–414DOI: 10.1002/apj