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 current COVID-19 pandemic has doubtlessly given all of us reason to reflect on many aspects of our lives. I have thought about friends and family and their well-being during this crisis, as well as the little things we all take for granted, like trips to the grocery store or having dinner in a restaurant.
I have also been considering what makes AIChE so special to me. It is each and every one of you — our members, volunteers, leaders, engineers, scientists, researchers, educators, professionals, and the many others who are diligently working to inspire our safe, connected, and inclusive community — all united to meet society’s current challenge, the coronavirus. There are many stories of these valiant efforts. Here are a few I’d like to share with you.
The project team from our RAPID Manufacturing Institute at the Univ. of Pittsburgh is using their research facilities to make hand sanitizer from donated chemicals. On a large scale, Huntsman is repurposing its coatings and adhesives facility in Alabama, and Dow Chemical re-engineered a plant in Germany to make hand sanitizer, adding to production from BASF, Lubrizol, Arkema, and P&G.
Chemical engineers in labs and plants have donated personal protective equipment (PPE) to medical personnel across the country who have desperate need for it. The Chemical and Biological Engineering Dept. at New York Univ. gave thousands of latex gloves and hundreds of masks to the Brooklyn Hospital Center. AIChE donated 3,000 travel-size bottles of hand sanitizer to Bellevue Hospital’s healthcare workers.
Additionally, RAPID and its members are working to help a team at Clemson Univ. build the supply chain for modular sterilization systems that can be rapidly deployed to medical facilities. 3M is producing 166.5 million N95 masks within the next three months to distribute across the U.S. Chemical engineers at companies such as Carbon and Stratasys are using their 3D printing technology to make PPE.
Our Center for Chemical Process Safety (CCPS) created a list of guidelines for managing process safety in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the 20 elements of risk-based process safety, these guidelines address manufacturing needs while taking into account the current disruption and threats to process safety and operational resources such as people, materials, and equipment.
Pharmaceutical and biological engineers are also helping produce faster and cheaper diagnostic solutions, repurposing and developing new drugs to treat patients, isolating antibodies against the present coronavirus, and testing new vaccines. Janssen Research & Development and Moderna are accelerating the development of potential vaccines, while a team at the Wyss Institute is developing a surrogate non-COVID coronavirus for use in studies.
Meanwhile, services companies such as Ginkgo Bioworks and Twist Biosciences have offered their platform to help support technology development. And universities are putting research on hold and shifting their focus to COVID-19. In the upcoming May CEP, you can read an article that describes such work underway at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
These are just a few examples of AIChE’s aspiration of chemical engineers Doing a World of Good. We can all be very proud of how our profession is working tirelessly to help solve this current crisis.
As we look for a resolution to this situation, while we all practice social distancing, it is my wish that each and every one of you stays safe and healthy.
This post is adapted from the guest editorial for the upcoming May Issue of CEP Magazine. You might also consider reading Cindy Mascone’s editorial for the April issue.
Comments
June,
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Hi Joe, I'm John Vasko, AIChE
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Thank you June for sharing
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Thank you June for sharing
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Iam Rama, worked as Head of
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As a chemical engineer we are
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