The Department of Chemical Engineering is pleased to announce the establishment of its Raymond F. Baddour (1949) Chemical Engineering Professorship, which will support a distinguished faculty member in the department.
Baddour, the Lammot du Pont Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering, received his MS in chemical engineering practice in 1949 and, upon earning his ScD from MIT in 1951, became an assistant professor in the department. He became a full professor in 1963 and founded MIT’s Environmental Laboratory in 1970, becoming its first director.
Baddour was head of the chemical engineering department from 1969 to 1976; during that time, he put together and executed a visionary plan to expand the department’s programs in applied chemistry, bioengineering, and energy/environmental engineering. He launched a bold and aggressive hiring initiative that broke with longstanding departmental traditions; now, 30 years later, Course X continues to see the positive impact of his vision.
Another impact of Baddour’s hard work is more tangible: In order to revitalize and address space concerns for new faculty and research programs, Baddour conceived of the plan to create the current home of the chemical engineering department, the Ralph Landau Building (Building 66). He also raised funds for the building completely through private sources, an act that has not been duplicated at the Institute since.
Baddour is also a role model for entrepreneurship: He started his first company in 1962, and has founded a total of 16 companies, including the 1980 co-founding of California-based biopharmaceutical giant Amgen. He has been on the board of directors of 13 companies, and has influenced some notably successful entrepreneurs, including Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, David Lam ScD ’74, and William Koch ’62, ScD ’71. In 1998, Baddour presented the department’s venerable Warren K. Lewis Lecture, entitled, “Start-ups and Letdowns — Reflections of a Professor in Venture Land.”
Baddour earned his BS in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1945. He has more 65 publications, and holds 16 patents.
The first Raymond F. Baddour Professor of Chemical Engineering will be Bernhardt L. Trout. Trout is currently director of the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing and co-chair of the Singapore-MIT Alliance Program on Chemical and Pharmaceutical Engineering. He received his SB and SM degrees from MIT and his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. In addition, he performed postdoctoral research at the Max-Planck Institute.
Trout’s research focuses on molecular engineering, specifically the development and application of both computational and experimental molecular-based methods to engineering pharmaceutical formulations and processes with unprecedented specificity. Since 1999, he has focused on molecular engineering for biopharmaceutical formulation, pharmaceutical crystallization, and pharmaceutical manufacturing. In 2007, with several colleagues from MIT, he set up the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing, a $85 million partnership that aims to transform pharmaceutical manufacturing.
In addition to Novartis, Trout has worked with many other pharmaceutical companies in research or consulting. He has published more than 150 papers and currently has 17 patent applications. With his MIT and Novartis colleagues in the MIT Novartis-Center and at the U.S. Foods and Drug Administration, he is the recipient of the Council for Chemical Collaboration Award in 2014, and will receive the 2014 AIChE Excellence in Process Development Research Award in November.