Initiating a Research-Focused Academic Career in Chemical Engineering: Perspectives from Faculty at Different Career Stages

Abstract

Each fall, eager young researchers participate in the Meet the Faculty Candidates poster session at the AIChE Annual Meeting, and many more apply to tenure‐track faculty openings at academic institutions across the United States and throughout the world. These individuals embark on this journey with the eventual goal of becoming full professors. The process of initiating an academic career and developing a successful independent research program is an arduous journey that involves multiple stages. These stages include being hired into a faculty position, building an independent research program that involves recruiting students and can include constructing a laboratory, identifying research areas and specific problems to investigate, and establishing oneself as a scientific leader of a particular subject matter area within a broader community. Faculty candidates commonly seek advice from mentors or peers who have recently navigated the faculty interview and hiring processes to successfully obtain an academic position. Additionally, they often review the wealth of resources that are available on the Internet and in print. However, it can be daunting to sieve through this collective knowledge base to identify relevant information, as it invariably contains conflicting viewpoints and advice that may be subjective, generic to any research‐focused faculty position, or highly field specific.

Files

Additional details