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KENNETH B. BISCHOFF
1936–2006
Elected in 1988
“For excellence in research and education in
chemical reaction engineering and in biomedical engineering.”
BY MARK A. BARTEAU
KENNETH B. BISCHOFF died on August 27, 2006. Ken was
born in Chicago on February 29, 1936, obviously a leap-year
baby. Ken was proud of this accidental distinction, and when
a leap-year day occurred, a special birthday celebration was
held. Ken also described himself in his leap-year age; at the
time of his death he was 17.373 (70 in conventional terms).
Ken enjoyed a distinguished academic and industrial career,
both in the United States and internationally. He earned his
B.S. in chemical engineering in 1957 at Illinois Institute of
Technology (IIT) and remained there for his Ph.D. (1961) under
the direction of Octave Levenspiel. His dissertation was on
backmixing in chemical reactors. His 1960–1961 postdoctoral
work was with Gilbert Froment at the Rijksuniversiteit
Gent. This marked the beginning of a long collaboration and
friendship. Ken was an assistant professor and an associate
professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1961
to 1967, where he was mentored by and collaborated with
David Himmelblau. This collaboration produced a textbook,
Process Analysis and Simulation (John Wiley & Sons, 1968). Ken
then served as an associate professor and as a full professor
at the University of Maryland from 1967 to 1970. There he
enjoyed a very productive collaboration with Bob Dedrick
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and together they
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34 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
founded the topical area of pharmacokinetics. At age 34, Ken
became the youngest person ever to hold an endowed chair
at Cornell University—the Walter R. Read Professorship of
Chemical Engineering. There he also was director of the School
of Chemical Engineering (1970–1975). In 1976, Ken joined the
University of Delaware as the Unidel Professor of Biomedical
and Chemical Engineering. He remained at Delaware until,
owing to health issues, he retired in 1997. He served as
department chairman of chemical engineering (1978–1982)
and as acting director of the Center for Catalytic Science and
Technology (1983–1984).
Ken’s primary research interests were in the areas of chemical
reaction engineering and applications to pharmacology and
toxicology, resulting in more than 100 journal articles and two
textbooks. His scholarly productivity was recognized with
many awards, including the IIT Distinguished Alumni Award
(1996) and several American Institute of Chemical Engineers
(AIChE) awards: fellow (1987), Professional Progress (1976),
Institute Lecture (1982), and Wilhelm Award (1987). He
received the Ebert Prize from the Academy of Pharmaceutical
Sciences (1972), became a fellow of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science (AAAS; 1980), and was elected
to the National Academy of Engineering (1988). Ken was also
active in professional service for the AIChE: he was elected
director (1972–1974), selected as program committee chairman
(1978), and was session chairman for many sessions. For the
American Chemical Society he was on the Awards Committee
and the editorial board of the Industrial & Engineering
Chemistry Annual Research Review and was an associate
editor of the Advances in Chemistry series. He also was
associate editor of Advances in Chemical Engineering (Elsevier),
volumes 12 (1982) through 23 (1996). He was chairman of the
First and cochairman of the Ninth International Symposium
on Reactor Engineering. He also served as chairman of the
Council for Chemical Research (1985).
Ken’s skills in mathematical model building led to significant
and enduring consulting collaborations, particularly with Bob
Dedrick at NIH and with many individuals at Exxon. His
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K E N N E T H B . B I S C H OFF 35
consulting with Exxon was unique: Each summer he would
stay at Exxon Research and Engineering for one month. At the
beginning of the month he was given a loosely defined topic.
He then read and mastered an assembly of open-literature
and related company reports. By the end of the month he had
this material cogently organized and broken into problems to
be solved in collaboration with engineers at Exxon. At Ken’s
retirement Exxon honored his many consulting contributions
with a plaque placed in the lobby of the Research and
Engineering Center. He also had conventional consulting
contracts with many other firms.
Ken’s research neatly divided into two general areas:
pharmacokinetics and reaction engineering. His pharma-
cokinetics work is exemplified by publications such as
“Methotrexate Pharmacokinetics” (Journal of Pharmaceutical
Sciences, 60, (1128) 1971), “Species Similarities in Pharmaco-
kinetics” (Federation Proceedings, 39, (54) 1980), “Pharma-
cokinetics and Cancer Chemotherapy” (Journal of Pharmaco-
kinetics and Biopharmaceutics, 1, (465) 1973), and many other
specialized papers. This list of representative titles shows how
Ken’s efforts spanned the topic of pharmacokinetics—indeed,
founded the topic and defined its scope.
Similarly, his work in reaction engineering was very broad.
He began writing the book Chemical Reactor Analysis and
Design in 1961; the first edition appeared in 1979 and the second
in 1989. Ken’s first publication modeled axial dispersion in
reactors, and he continued writing about this topic through
much of his career. He was concerned with the difficult topic
of parameter identification in reacting systems and later with
the implications of lumping the kinetics of systems with a
large number of species into more easily understood blocks.
He developed a generalized model for estimating the catalyst
effectiveness factor in complex systems and on coke formation
with catalyst deactivation.