During a recent academic visit to Mexico, Professor Marc-Olivier Coppens delivered a plenary lecture to about 800 participants at the 46th National Meeting of AMIDIQ (Mexican Chemical Engineering conference for Academic Research and Education), held in Los Cabos, from 13-16 May. The talk outlined how nature’s principles can serve as a foundation for rethinking and redesigning chemical processes, with the goal of achieving more efficient and sustainable technologies. Professor Nelly Ramírez from UDLAP (Puebla) was the Chair of the conference, as President of AMIDIQ.
Prof. Coppens was impressed with the high scientific level of the conference, the focus on sustainability, and the incredible enthusiasm of the participants, including the many students (with about 50% female engineers), with very lively, deep discussions revealing a healthy state of chemical engineering education in Mexico. Despite the amazing weather and the beautiful beach, researchers and students attended talks and posters in very high numbers, with overfilling halls… and made sure to enjoy great food, drinks, sun, beach, and equally lively, animated parties with live music and dance after that! Talking about work/life balance, the Mexicans seem to have figured it out!
Beyond this participation in the national congress, Professor Coppens carried out an academic tour across three prestigious institutions in Mexico, enjoying a fabulous welcome by his respective hosts. First, he visited Universidad de Guadalajara, hosted by Professor Aida Alejandra Pérez and Professor Martin Arellano, where he had the great honour to present this year’s Neal R. Amundson lectures, named after the famous Professor Amundson (Minnesota and Houston), one of the fathers of chemical engineering science, who had an honorary doctorate of the university, was a frequent visitor, and a promoter of their graduate programme – several current faculty studied at the University of Minnesota, and a rigorous tradition for chemical engineering fundamentals is kept alive. Apart from nature-inspired chemical engineering (NICE), Prof. Coppens lectured on technical aspects of the modelling of diffusion in mesoporous materials, and how this can be related to experiments. This is a highly impactful but undervalued subject, which he also spoke about in a recent IAS (International Adsorption Society) Webinar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgjyEk3dbsA ) and is summarised in a recently published IUPAC report (https://doi.org/10.1515/pac-2023-1126).
He then visited the Universidad de Guanajuato, where he spoke in the ancient Council Hall, a World Heritage site, on the invitation of the Rector General, Dr Claudia Susana Gómez López and Professor Juan Gabriel Segovia Hernandez. Here he spoke about “Interdisciplinarity as a Catalyst to Change the World - Responsible Innovation for Sustainability & Society”. He presented his broader views on “engineering as a humanity” (quoting John Prausnitz), transformative technology, and what that meant in the context of responsible innovation for sustainability and society. Adopting new methodologies to achieve sustainable development are required, one promising avenue being nature-inspired solutions, reached using a systematic approach. His presentation related to the UCL CNIE’s work on the UCL Grand Challenges, particularly the just concluded UCL Grand Challenge for Transformative Technology.
Finally, he visited Universidad de las Américas Puebla, invited by Professor Nelly Ramirez, and where he discussed nature-inspired chemical engineering within the context of responsible innovation, merging the topics discussed in Guanajuato and Guadalajara.
These visits promoted dialogue on fundamental and applied research, strategic thinking on interdisciplinarity and responsible innovation, and the future of chemical engineering, stimulating international collaboration and inspiring future directions in process intensification and sustainability.
