The mission of the Advisory Board is to help the Chemical Engineering Department achieve its academic mission. The advisory board is comprised of members from academic institutions, consulting firms, private practice, and industry. The members of the Departmental Advisory Board
· Function as constituents representing employers of our graduates.
· Advise the department on mission statement, program educational objectives and outcomes
· Serve as a lobby group to promote chemical engineering education
· Support department research activities
· Assist the department in communicating with local industries
· Assist the department in fund raising activities
The board shall consist of professionals from all pertinent Chemical Engineering disciplines with experience in the public and/or private sector. At the advice of the department faculty, six members were selected and were appointed by the Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department for a three year term (renewable).
The advisory board will meet a minimum of once per year, for about one day. Prior to each meeting, the Chair of the Chemical Engineering Department will issue an agenda for distribution to all board members and to the Chemical Engineering faculty.
David Atkinson
David Atkinson has over 20 years experience in the pulp and paper manufacturing and engineering fields. He joined the New Hampshire firm of Wausau Papers in 1993 and has been Vice President of Operations since 1999, having previously directed their manufacturing facility and managed all paper making.
Prior to Wausau, he worked for the Rhinelander Paper Company in Wisconsin and the James River Corporation in New Hampshire. He is involved in many community activities, including holding directorships in the First Colebrook Bank and the NH Business and Industry Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the DHA/Weeks Memorial Hospital and the Knights of Columbus, and is a volunteer for the Colonial Town Re-creation. He has a degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of New Hampshire, and attended the University of Michigan Business School. He is a member of the UNH Chemical Engineering Advisory Board.
Gordon Cheng
Mr. Cheng, President of ChemicaLogic Corporation, is a management consultant to chemical and related industries. For over 30 years he has been helping clients to resolve management issues from the perspectives of chemical technology and market competitiveness; for 18 of those years he was associated with Arthur D. Little, Inc.
Drawing on his expertise in process technology, process economics, project appraisal, and operations management, Mr. Cheng assists clients worldwide in selecting technologies for implementation, assessing market potential, evaluating project or venture feasibility, appraising business value, benchmarking technical and business process performances, debottlenecking for productivity improvement, and planning strategy for corporate development.
Mr. Cheng's assignments have taken him to a wide variety of situations in the chemical and allied process industries, including petrochemical, refinery, pharmaceutical, brewery, fertilizers, electronics, specialty chemicals and food processing. Mr. Cheng monitors emerging process technologies, including Gas-to-Liquids (GTL), fuel processing for fuel cell vehicles, hydrogen storage, CO2 sequestration and fuels from biomass. Mr. Cheng also studies the market dynamics of chemical commodities in China.
Mr. Cheng consults extensively in Asia on venture feasibility, technology transfer, and development strategy. Mr. Cheng has conducted numerous assignments for government agencies and private chemical companies in Taiwan. For the Spark Program Office of China State Science and Technology Council, he delivered a training course on enterprise management and technology evaluation to a group of senior project managers. On behalf of the Asia Foundation, Mr. Cheng held a seminar in Pudong, Shanghai on “Pollution Prevention” to introduce techniques to minimize pollution in process industries.
Mr. Cheng received his master degree in Chemical Engineering from University of New Hampshire, and his Bachelor of Engineering from Chung-Yuan University in Taiwan. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and American Institute of Chemical Engineers. Earlier in his career, Mr. Cheng was a development engineer with Cryogenic Technology, Inc. and Kahn & Company.
Allen Leach
Joseph Paterno
Dr. Paterno attended the University of New Hampshire, graduating magna cum laude with a BS degree in Chemical Engineering in 1963. He was president of the NH Alpha Chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, graduating with an MS degree in Chemical Engineering in 1965. Following MIT, he interned at Avco Corporation working on the re-entry heat shield for the Apollo spacecraft command module. He then attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute under a NASA Fellowship where he took his Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering, majoring in Polymer Science, in 1970.
From 1970 to 1991 he worked for the Norton Company in Worcester, Massachusetts and rapidly rose through the ranks from senior research engineer to research supervisor to director of R&D to divisional vice president to vice president of worldwide manufacturing and finally to corporate vice president. As part of Norton’s philosophy of developing management talent, in 1978 the company sent him to attend the Executive Summer Program at Dartmouth College’s Amos Tuck Business School. At one point in his Norton career, Dr. Paterno had operating responsibility for all abrasive manufacturing plants worldwide encompassing 13 plants in 8 countries with 2800 employees. He traveled extensively on business throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico as well as in England, France, Germany, Italy, Brazil, Japan and South Africa. He was an early advocate of bringing statistical methods to the factory floor to improve process control, quality and cost. He also taught strategic planning at Norton Company’s Management Institute.
Following his retirement from Norton in 1991, Dr. Paterno joined the University of New Hampshire staff as the Executive Director of the NH Industrial Research Center providing technical help to NH companies. He continues to serve as an adjunct professor of Chemical Engineering.
Although he formally retired from the University in 1996, he maintains close relations with the University’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences volunteering his time to assist the College’s dean with industrial relations and as chairman of the College’s Industrial Advisory Council. He also serves on the Chemical Engineering Department’s Advisory Board. In appreciation of the fine undergraduate education Dr. Paterno received at UNH, in 2001 he and his wife Nancy gave the University a testamentary trust to establish the Joe and Nancy Paterno Endowed Scholarship Fund to support deserving NH engineering students with financial need.
Richard Stone
(Photo credit: Timothy Francisco)
Dick has over 35 years of experience in the electric power industry and 20 years of experience in the competitive power industry. Dick joined Excelsior Energy in July 2006 and is responsible for development, engineering and environmental permitting. He was most recently based in Hampton, N.H. as vice president of business development for Wheelabrator Technologies Inc, responsible for developing and acquiring new projects and restructuring existing projects. A wholly owned subsidiary of Waste Management, Inc. of Houston, Texas, Wheelabrator Technologies in Hampton, N.H., owns and/or operates 17 waste-to-energy facilities and six independent power production facilities.
Prior to Wheelabrator, Dick was the president of Westmoreland Coal Company's independent power development company, based in Colorado Springs and vice president of business development of CogenAmerica, a publicly-traded independent power producer based in Minnetonka. Prior to obtaining his competitive power experience, Dick had an 18-year career with Stone & Webster Engineering Corporation in Boston. He has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of New Hampshire and is a member of the Chemical Engineering Department's Advisory Board.
Ray Yang
Dr. Ray Y. K. Yang received his PhD at Princeton University and joined the faculty of West Virginia University in 1982. His major research activities, both experimental and theoretical, lie in the field of biochemical and chemical reaction engineering, in particular Biochemical Engineering and Biotechnology, Chemical Reaction Engineering and System Analysis and Modeling. The aim of his research is to improve the productivities of biochemical and chemical reactors or to develop novel ones.
Currently, Dr. Yang's research concentrates on membrane processes for enzymatic saccharification of lignocellulose; controlled release of intracellular products from plant cells and tissues; spontaneous and forced oscillations in bioreaction systems; and self-sustained oscillations in enzymatic hydrogels.
In addition to his industrial research experience in petroleum industry, Dr. Yang also taught at Edinburgh University (UK), the University of Queensland (Australia), and Cornell University (sabbatical leave) before joining the faculty at West Virginia.