Richard Stock

Professor of Chemical Engineering

About

I graduated in 1974 from the University of Nottingham in England with a B.Sc. (Hons) in Chemical Engineering. The program in Nottingham was (and is), unusually for the UK, a four-year program. This allowed students to choose a sequence of elective courses beyond the required chemical engineering curriculum – effectively a minor. I studied economics, accounting and industrial relations as electives.

After graduation I joined Price Waterhouse, Ltd., a major accounting firm and learned how companies work from the board room to the post room. I did audits, financial analyses and investigations for companies like Shell Oil, Gulf Oil and Stone and Webster. I left Price Waterhouse in 1976 having realized that I really missed engineering and joined Constructors John Brown, a leading plant construction and consulting company, and worked as a Cost Engineer on one of their projects. When that project finished I joined British Petroleum as a Development Engineer at their Sunbury Research and Development Center on the outskirts of London and worked primarily on development of BP’s molecular sieve and isomerization processes for enhancing gasoline performance. Some of the other really interesting stuff I was involved in included rigorous HAZOP studies, membership of a team performing critical studies of alternative energy sources and  working as technical support at a BP refinery for a year.

In 1980 was accepted in to the graduate program at West Virginia University. My advisor was Professor Gene Cilento, now Glen Hiner Dean of the College of Engineering and Mineral Resources. Under his guidance I  studied the distribution of blood plasma within mammalian spleens and, later, the characteristics of macromolecular uptake by liver hepatocytes.

In 1987, Professor Stock joined the team of the Tumor Microcirculation Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University under the direction of Professor Rakesh Jain (currently the Andrew Werk Cook Professor of Tumor Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical School). here I researched tumor microcirculation as well as developed methods of automating measurements of parameters such as in vivo flow, diffusion and permeability. I also was the principle officer in a project to transfer this technology to the commercial field.

Ultimately in 1994, I joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at The Cooper Union. Currently I teach courses in design, reaction engineering as well as the senior lab class. Occasionally I teach Biotransport Phenomena, normally as a one-on-one course outside the classroom.

A amjor occupation is the CONNECT Program to help develop the communication skills of undergraduate engineers. Initially funded by the Department of Education the CONNECT Program continues today as part of a four semester sequence of Professional Development Seminars and Workshops and also as an integral part of a number of courses throughout the engineering school.

I have supervised Masters student research on a range of topics including process design, process simulation, biofermentation, the economics of NYC water systems, laboratory simulations and in vitro cellular reactions.