Editorial

Abstract

It is a great pleasure and honour to have been selected to be the new editor-in-chief for the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. I would like to thank my predecessor, Prof. K. Nandakumar, as well as all the members of the CIC publications team and John Wiley & Sons for their warm welcome and for kindly helping me during this transition period. I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of the previous editors of the CJChE, Professors L. W. Shemilt, N. Epstein, C. W. Robinson and P. J. Carreau. It is a privilege and a great responsibility to follow on their footsteps; I truly hope to maintain the international reputation the CJChE has acquired under their direction. A journal such as the CJChE, which aims at publishing manuscripts covering a wide spectrum of chemical engineering themes, has great opportunities but also faces significant challenges today. Besides the core areas of transport phenomena, reaction engineering, and thermodynamics, our profession extents into areas so diverse from each other as advanced new materials, bioengineering and biomedical applications, nanotechnology, alternative energy sources, and environmental engineering, just to mention a few. How to keep the focus on the traditional areas that define chemical engineering as a distinct discipline and still attract manuscripts from the various interdisciplinary subjects chemical engineers are engaged on is the major difficulty a journal such as the CJChE faces, but it is also what makes it such a dynamic and engaging publication. Undoubtedly, this diversity of themes, interconnected through a few core areas, is what makes chemical engineering so rich and stimulating and also what has captivated most of us since our undergraduate days; to be able to capture this variety of themes between the covers of a single scientific journal will be one of the main goals of the CJChE editorial board. One of the new initiatives planned to reach this objective is to establish special feature article series on current research topics in chemical engineering. These series will typically include six to ten articles written by leading experts in the field and will be published over a period of one to two years, one to two articles per issue. The series will be organised by the editor-in-chief, one of the associate editors, or by a guest editor in their area of interest. Thematic areas covered in the series will include both core as well as non-traditional chemical engineering topics. It is a great pleasure for me to announce that our first three articles series are already being planned in the areas of Chemical Reaction Engineering (Guest Editor: Professor John Grace, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of British Columbia), Nanotechnology (Guest Editors: Professors Michael Tam and Frank Gu, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Waterloo), and Biomedical Engineering and Biotechnology (Guest Editor: Professor Elizabeth Jones, Department of Chemical Engineering, McGill University). We intend to broaden the international profile of the CJChE by inviting researchers from institutions abroad to join our editorial board as associated editors and by encouraging them to work actively with the editor-in-chief to attract top quality papers from worldwide researchers. We also intend to give a wider coverage to our annual Canadian Conference of Chemical Engineering by dedicating one special issue of the CJChE to outstanding research and review papers presented in this event. Special issues to celebrate the achievements of Canadian researchers, researchers who had an important impact in science and engineering in Canada, and topics of international relevance in chemical engineering, are also part of the future plans for the CJChE. Perhaps more importantly, I would like to invite our readers to participate actively in the development of their journal by welcoming any suggestions or comments they may have during my term as editor-in-chief. I look forward to an active and extensive exchange of ideas with all my colleagues in Canada and abroad during the next five years.