Alan Foss Autobiography

THE GILMAN HALL NEWSLETTER - December 1983 Vol. 8, No. 2

Your editor sent a message by inter-cerebral communications to Alan Foss to prepare a little biographical sketch and to reflect on his experiences in the department. In sequencing these biographical sketches, we are working our way through the faculty according to length of service in the department. It is now his turn. The message was received in one or two neuron firings. His sketch, written for us just after having graded the Fall semester’s final exams, will take only slightly longer to read.

“There must be an irrepressible driving force to go into teaching.” That’s what I tell the young men and women who stop in to talk to me about their intentions to embark on an academic career. That’s how it was for me, anyhow, some twenty years ago when I accepted the invitation to join the department here at Berkeley. There was nothing that I wanted to do more than to try my hand at teaching chemical engineering and to dig into some research problems that had been hanging untouched for years. I felt that I had novel ways of approaching certain subjects in engineering education and I wanted to try them out. There were also some new topics that I thought would be valuable additions, but it was the prospect of trying new approaches that most interested me. My approaches have, in the intervening years, been modified several times over, but I think they are still novel.

An irrepressible driving force is, in my opinion, an absolute necessity. Without it, the escalating demands of this profession could easily blunt the keenness of mind and spirit that are needed to stimulate the young generation and could lead one to imagine that the grass is indeed greener on the other side of the fence. I came into teaching from the other side of the fence and I therefore know about the grass there. I had been a research engineer with the Du Pont Company in Wilmington, Delaware, for five years after completing graduate work at the University of Delaware. Polymer processing under industrial conditions occupied a major amount of my attention during those five years with Du Pont. It was challenging and fascinating work and quite a change from the studies of tray efficiencies that I had carried out in graduate school. I expect that just about every graduate experiences the same sort of abrupt change when he or she takes an industrial position. Control system planning and design was an even more fascinating activity for me at Du Pont and one that stimulated my planning for an academic career in that field. That, too, was part of the driving force of which I speak. A few years of part-time teaching at the University of Delaware during my Du Pont years--some of it in process control--further whetted my interest in teaching. The urge to try my hand at teaching and to get started on those intriguing questions in process control eventually built up to an irrepressible urge even though the challenge of industrial problems was by no means lacking.

Thus, in 1961, just married, I came to Berkeley (two great leaps there) and set about teaching a graduate course in chemical process dynamics, putting new ideas into the unit operations laboratory, developing a graduate course in process optimization, designing and building a teaching laboratory for our undergraduate process control course, and looking into the mysterious dynamic behavior of fixed-bed chemical reactors. Even though there was a lot of turmoil on campus in the ‘60s that sometimes reached down to the pit of one’s stomach, that decade was a propitious one for getting started in an academic career. There was a great momentum nationally and superb resources here in the department (that is to say, after the chemists moved out of Gil- man Hall). Besides all that teaching activity, Charles Tobias made sure that I acquired some administrative experience during his tenure as chairman by appointing me one of two vice chairmen of the department. We had two vice chairmen; as I have just said, we were well heeled in the ‘60s. An extracurricular activity involved serving as an officer and ultimately chairman of the Northern California Section of the AIChE. Helping coach the California Lacrosse Team was another extracurricular activity for some years. Lacrosse is that rough-and-tumble field game played by the native tribes on the east coast of North America long before Europeans set foot here.

The sport of lacrosse I picked up in prep school (yes, I was a preppy) on the slopes above the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. Mount Hermon School offered a superb environment for the development of the intellect and personal qualities; I had the good fortune to bask in that atmosphere for four years. My earlier years found me among the gentle long ridges of Stamford, Connecticut, the place of my birth. I stayed in New England to study chemical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a small undergraduate school in Worcester, Massachusetts. The faculty there gave us a lot of attention and a good foundation in engineering, nothing fancy or sophisticated. They taught us how to use what we had learned. I continued my love affair there with the game of lacrosse, helping to start a team and playing on it during my four years in Worcester. We were one of the top teams among the small colleges in New England. I went on to graduate school at the University of Delaware after receiving my B.S. degree at Worcester. Immersing myself in a more sophisticated approach to things in graduate school made graduate study a fascinating experience. And the top-notch teaching there held my admiration.

Hailing from New England sets me off as something of an outsider here in the department; none of my colleagues have been born, raised, and educated there. The historian Arnold Toynbee claims it makes a difference. But the New England heritage is only part of it. In the first place, my field of interest is definitely outside the tradition of the department and the college. Research into fundamental physical and chemical phenomena, which is the orientation here, is not a part of my work. Rather, I concentrate on the conception and building of engineering systems. Even my teaching assignments and the objectives I set for students in my courses are “outside.” My teaching is concentrated on the outside fringes of the undergraduate curriculum, the front end and the tail end. In our freshman elective course, Modern Chemical Technology, I have been challenging students to apply their knowledge of freshman chemistry and high school physics to simplified versions of current engineering problems. In our senior elective course in process control, the challenge to apply is the same; the subject matter is just different. In all my courses, I take the view that knowledge and understanding, while necessary, are not sufficient in engineering; the ability to apply knowledge in creative ways is an essential additional talent that needs nurturing. That view and my practice of conducting courses to achieve such an objective definitely places me on the outer fringes among my colleagues and undergraduate students.

Ah! But I am an inside outsider. That makes a big difference. The departmental faculty is remarkable for its open and intelligent way of accommodating differences in style and differences of opinion. All of us, even those with minority views, get heard, and not infrequently the minority voice provides the turn of thought needed to break a log jam. My views on pedagogy, the curriculum, grading standards, abiding by policies we ourselves have formed, and the matter of racial discrimination are well known to my colleagues. My views and ideas have had an impact over the years. Thus, it does not matter to me at all that I am an outsider-- because I am inside.

The research in which graduate students and I have been engaged focuses on the development of control systems for chemical processes. That involves studies of process dynamics, control concepts, numerical approximation, optimization, estimation, computer system technology, and the synthesis of practicable systems incorporating all of these elements. The work is challenging because it cuts across such a wide swath of engineering. We see that it is necessary to consider processes that exhibit strong interactions among several variables and processes for which abnormal operating conditions require special control action. Our emphasis is on conceiving the control system configuration, that is, learning what information must be extracted from an operating process, what transformations should be made in that information, and how the information should be used to effect control. We test our conceptions on laboratory fixed-bed exothermic reactors that have a tendency toward instability. Our conceptions are implemented, as may be expected, with on-line computers.

It was the opportunity to teach that brought me to Berkeley and it’s in this activity that I find a great satisfaction. Bringing together the major ideas in a field, focusing whatever illumination those ideas can shed on the solution of current problems, and finding ways to make those ideas understandable and their use practicable is a continuing challenge. The greatest challenge is accomplishing this with our undergraduate students. There, I find that a rather delicate balance is needed in telling, asking, testing, challenging, encouraging, tutoring, correcting, stretching, leading. I am still searching for the right mix. And the search goes on for new ways to make it more understandable, more stimulating, and oriented more to the creative use of all that knowledge. All of that takes a driving force. And irrepressible, it must be.