Dr. Vincent VanBrunt, P.E., is an award-winning professor at the University of South Carolina with more than 33 years of professional experience. He taught the first required chemical process safety course in the United States. He serves on the technical advisory board of the Mary Kay O’Conner Process Safety Center at Texas A&M University and is a member of the Safety and Chemical Engineering Education Committee of the Center for Chemical Process Safety. He has consulted with DuPont, Eastman Chemical Company, Westinghouse, Union Carbide Corporation and Dow Chemical Company. Dr. VanBrunt has evaluated process safety hazards, including toxic chemicals, fire and explosions, and has performed accident investigations, including the BP Texas City incident in March 2005 as a member of the Packer team. He is a Fellow of the AIChE and a founding member of the AIChE Separations Division, where he served as Area Chair for extraction for eight years and as a Division Director for four years. He has developed extraction processes for both hydrometallurgical and organic systems, including several systems utilizing extraction with reaction. His separations research includes the following unit operations: absorption, adsorption, zonal centrifugation, precipitation, solvent extraction, distillation (including heat-integrated columns, azeotropic distillation, extractive distillation and stripping), filtration (including crossflow filtration) and flow sheet design. For a decade, Dr. VanBrunt operated a filtration pilot plant through 37 campaigns using ISO 9000 quality standard guidelines.