Page 7 - CEMS Winter 2022 Newsletter

CEMS NEWS
Retirement reflections continued from page 6 Jeff Schott
Jeff also took on an additional role of project manager during the construction of the Gore Annex, a 40,000 sq. ft. addition to Amundson Hall, completed in 2014. “I’m most proud of helping get the Gore Annex built. The project was an interesting challenge over several years with a major sense of accomplishment when it was done,” said Jeff.
Please share your well wishes for Jeff: https://www. kudoboard.com/boards/L82SCdYH
Jeff Schott
Professor Jeff Schott (ChE
’70, M.S. ’74, PhD ’78) found
his way “home” to CEMS after obtaining his MBA and working for 25 years in technical positions at various companies.
“The first thing I noticed when
I returned to CEMS was that most of the building looked the same inside, but the Unit Ops Lab was very different. There was a new distillation column in an enclosed room, and the room that had been my office
Friedrich Srienc
Friedrich started in CEMS
and the Biological Process Technology Institute at the University of Minnesota in 1985. He remarked, “One of the main motivations for me
to join CEMS was Professor Arnie Fredrickson, whose work I admire. It had a profound influence on my own work. After joining the Department we had a long lasting, productive collaboration
(also the Unit Ops Lab office) was somewhat smaller. Some of the experiments had been added, and some “refurbished.” Raul Caretta and Christie Geankoplis were both very helpful in getting me oriented to the course. The building was now air conditioned, which was a welcome improvement for warm fall and spring days.
The development of personal computers/laptops over the 20 years I worked in CEMS made it easier for students to do computations, but the focus on problem solving skills, communication skills, and planning/organizing remained essentially the same as when L.E. “Skip” Scriven, Bill Ranz, and others taught the courses.”
Jeff continued, “The best memories are when students “saw the light” by recognizing the range of skills they
had developed as a result of the Unit Ops experiments. The time went by so fast, it didn’t seem like that long. Each semester was a new challenge with a new group of students. Teaching summer courses (MatS 2001/2002) for most of the time also made time pass in a steady stream without clear markers that years were passing. I’ll miss the students who were inquisitive and intellectually engaged in the process of becoming engineers by learning to ask themselves “why” whenever they made a choice.”
Friedrich Srienc
More recently, my group focused on the statistical interpretation of metabolic reaction networks. We developed techniques to optimize metabolic pathways that are useful for designing efficient production systems of metabolites made by microbes.
In the early days it was always a challenge to submit proposals. Word processing was in its infancy. We had to draw Figures separately by hand and paste them into text. There was no Internet communication. We had to make
continued on page 14
which I enjoyed very much. At
that time, we tried to use flow
cytometry to make use of Arnie’s cell population models. This work was unique, experimentally challenging and required students to combine both engineering skills and a deep biological understanding of cell physiology.
CEMSnews Winter 2022 7