June Wispelwey
June Wispelwey, Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) is a chemical engineer and business leader with vast work experience in the chemical and bio-pharmaceutical fields. Prior to becoming AIChE executive director, June served as executive director of the Society for Biological Engineering (SBE), a technical community within AIChE, overseeing its successful launch and growth. Under her leadership, SBE developed a successful consortium to advance genomic research on the Chinese hamster ovary cell lines which are important to pharmaceutical and biotechnological production.
Before joining SBE and AIChE, June served as vice president of marketing services at Aventis Behring, the leading therapeutic proteins manufacturer. As a senior executive and key member of Aventis Behring's Operations Management team, she worked closely with global and regional business leaders to identify, design, optimize and implement business processes and systems to increase efficiencies and improve the quality of business information and led efforts in commercial finance, supply chain, market research, market services, and outcomes research.
She spent many years in the chemical industry progressing from process engineering to finance and planning to marketing and finally in business management. Prior to working at Aventis Behring, Wispelwey served as global director of performance chemicals business development and research and development at Lyondell. She turned around the performance of a global specialty isocyanate business, as well as leading the global business development and research development organizations of a $1 billion performance chemicals business. Subsequent to this, Wispelwey worked in process engineering, strategic planning, marketing, research and development, business development and business management. These experiences provided her with an entrepreneurial approach to AIChE initiatives in new technologies and energy.
After earning a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at Princeton University and a master's degree in chemical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, June began her career at ARCO Chemical, now LyondellBasell. She has also completed Aventis executive education program at the Wharton School of Business. She is an AIChE fellow and serves on the Board of the United Engineering Foundation (UEF) and its grants committee. She has served on prior boards including Aventis Behring’s Employee Savings investment Committee and the ARCO Chemical Technology Management Corporation.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2018 to AIChE Fellow Frances H. Arnold, Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for her work in the directed evolution of enzymes.
In 1993, Arnold conducted the first directed evolution of enzymes—proteins that catalyze chemical reactions. She has since developed methods now routinely used to create new catalysts. Arnold’s method of directed evolution emulates natural selection through iterative application of random mutagenesis and rapid mutant screening in order to accumulate beneficial mutations. This technology allows Arnold’s laboratory to breed proteins with desirable traits that would have otherwise been difficult or impossible to design, leading to the creation of new and useful enzymes with applications in pharmaceuticals, sustainable biofuels, and other environmentally friendly products.
Arnold shares the Nobel Prize with the team of George P. Smith of the University of Missouri, Columbia, and Sir Gregory P. Winter of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, UK, who collaborated on the phage display of peptides and antibodies.
In 2017, AIChE presented Frances Arnold with the inaugural Margaret Hutchinson Rousseau Pioneer Award for Lifetime Achievement by a Woman Chemical Engineer. The award is presented to a woman member of AIChE who has made significant contributions to chemical engineering research or practice over the course of her career and who has helped pave the way for other women to have a greater impact in chemical engineering.
Learn more about Frances' journey in a recent AIChE Doing a World of Good Podcast.
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