CEAS hosts Prof Megan Jobson's Inaugural Lecture

On Friday, 29 March the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science (CEAS) hosted Professor Megan Jobson in the Sackville Street Building as she delivered her Inaugural Lecture 'Seeking Synergies in Separation Processes'.

The lecture was delivered to a mix of academic and professional service staff, postgraduate research students, and family, as well as a number of colleagues whom Megan has met throughout journey through separation processes.

In the lecture, Megan introduced the ideas and principles of process integration, highlighting heat recovery and 'pinch analysis' as key opportunities to reduce energy consumption and to increase efficiency of industrial processes.

In doing so, Megan took us through some of the work of PhD students whom she has supervised over the last 23 years, looking into ways of streamlining processes for manufacturing crude oil in order to make these processes have a greater yield of usable product, while also using less energy and reducing costs. This led to a recent Knowledge Transfer Partnership that enabled one PhD graduate to apply her modelling approach in an engineering consultancy firm that carried out a project on a Spanish refinery - leading to a saving of approximately $7 million (£5.4 million) per year, with no capital investment.

Megan then discussed her work on process development, such as that on reprocessing used nuclear fuel by separating elements from the fuel dissolved in acid and separating the toxic elements, and her work on recovering rare earth elements from used electronic equipment to help sustain our modern 'high tech' lifestyles.

Towards the end of her lecture, Megan thanked those who had inspired her throughout her life - from her father, who encouraged her to learn how to change the oil in her car, to the teacher who told her that "of course girls can study engineering". Driven by the belief that she could achieve, Megan has worked to become a leading academic within the field of process integration. She has called for other academics to lend support and give encouragement to those who are underrepresented in STEM fields because she believes that science and engineering should be for everyone.

While the School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science has no more Inaugural Lectures currently planned, we will be highlighting our academics, as well as their research, on our blog - including our interview with Megan.