Fellowship Aims To Boost Study In Broad Discipline

A West German chemical com-pany's United States subsidiary intends to make its presence known in North America over the next five years by offering a bonanza to grad students at U.S. universities. The Henkel Corp., which opened its U.S. research facility in Ambler, Pa., last fall, will award at least four two-year fellowships of $20,000 per year to third- and fourth-year doctoral candidates in colloid and surface chemistry. The discipline, which focuses on the interaction between particles and surfaces, is relatively young, but nonetheless crucial to industry. David Devore, a senior member of Henkel's technical staff and one of the three scientists who will be selecting the recipient of the first Henkel Fellowship, acknowledges that the $20,000 award - intended to cover equipment and travel expenses for the recipient, as well as a salary - is "up there with the most funding available" to graduate students. The largess, he says, is meant to send a signal to U.S. scientists that Henkel is "here [in North America] seriously to do research." Although the company is well known in Europe, Devore explains, "in the U.S., we're not a household name." As a first step toward becoming better known in the States, he says, "we want to make an initial, strong impact in the academic community." The first Henkel Fellowship will begin this fall, with one student selected to receive funding for two years. In each of the following years, a two-year award will be given to one additional student. The program is cosponsored by the American Chemical Society's Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry, which will administer the disbursement of funds. Henkel has committed itself to supporting the program for a minimum of five years and will spend at least $160,000 to fund it. But Devore says that although his company's pledge to fund the program extends only through the 1994-95 academic year, "it's my expectation that the fellowship will run indefinitely." When the firm evaluates the awards, he says, company officials will assess "how successful the students have been"; Henkel will also examine whether the program has been "successful in stimulating interest in the field and - from a selfish point of view - stimulating interest in the Henkel Corp." But the fellowship is "absolutely not" intended solely for students who are planning to work in industry, Devore says. In fact, he notes, of the students who have applied for the program's first award, "most intend to pursue an academic career." Eventually, Devore says, Henkel wants its U.S. division to forge collaborations with academic researchers, and the fellowship is a way of identifying "people who are doing work that is of interest." Robert Rowell, who is a professor of chemistry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and served as chairman of ACS' Division of Colloid and Surface Chemistry in 1986, is also a member of the committee selecting Henkel Fellowship recipients. The ACS division's involvement in the fellowship, Rowell says, helps to ensure that the program is a "good, proper scientific exercise." By funding the students, he explains, Henkel is "saying, in effect, `[the discipline] is important to us, and we think it's important to the scientific community.' " And the need for chemists in this specialty is constantly growing, says Barbara Kinzig, who currently chairs the ACS division and is president of Surface Research and Applications, a company based in Lenexa, Kans., that does research in surface chemistry. "The field has come into its own in the past 10 years, as people are becoming more and more interdisciplinary in their approach to research," she says. According to Kinzig, the discipline's applications are expanding in biotechnology, in which surface chemistry plays a crucial role in the scale-up of new pharmaceuticals; paints and coatings, in which the interaction of surfactants and materials is playing a larger role as formulations are changed to meet new emissions requirements; and biological implants, in which surface chemistry helps ensure that the materials have a biocompatible surface. But those in industry are concerned that there will not be enough colloid and surface chemists in the future. Although ACS does not keep statistics on the growth of the specialty, Kinzig says, her division has roughly 2,000 members, out of about 110,000 total chemical society members. "The field is just coming of age; that's where a perceived shortage comes into the picture," she says. A concomitant of Henkel's establishment of a U.S. research facility has been a need for the company to hire more chemists in this specialty, Devore says. The firm, whose products include surfactants, anticorrosion and coating materials for automobiles, and chemicals for the paper industry, "needs research support in the U.S.," he says. Henkel, headquartered in Duesseldorf, W.Ger., and with U.S. applications laboratories in Michigan and North Carolina, has worldwide sales of $6 billion, more than $1 billion of which come from the U.S. "As sales grow, you have to build your research staff to design new products," Devore says. Henkel now employs 30 research scientists at its Ambler facility, and "we want to grow to 45 by the end of this year," he says. "We're looking to hire 15 highly trained, Ph.D.-level surface chemists. It's a formidable task to find that many people within a year in the U.S." Devore says he believes a factor contributing to a dearth of researchers in the discipline is that it "tends to be one of the more demanding branches within chemistry; it requires a high level of mathematical ability. Fewer students are willing to take that challenge in graduate school." To encourage those who thrive on challenges, Devore says, the Henkel Fellowship is intended to support students who want to undertake "risky work at an extremely high level." Students seeking a challenge undoubtedly were not disappointed by the Henkel Fellowship application, which, in addition to serving as a way for committee members to learn about the candidates, also was "intended for educational purposes on the part of the students," according to Devore. Applicants were required to submit three letters of recommendation, a 100-word abstract, a detailed proposal, a literature survey, a list of their specific goals for the project, requirements for equipment and supplies, a project budget, a curriculum vitae, reprints of their publications, a description of their career goals, and a delineation of "what the critical decision points were" regarding their choice of vocation, Devore says. The Henkel staffer says candidates' thesis advisers have complimented the committee in their letters of recommendation, saying the students have found it "helpful to put down on paper where they were going with their thesis project." The award money, Rowell says, "will be handled in the same way [other] fellowships are: The actual award would be administered by the university, with the stipulation that all the funds will go to the student and his program in accordance with a budget that he's laid out in his proposal." Devore, Rowell, and John Gland - professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan, last year's ACS division chairman, and the third member of the Henkel Fellowship committee - are now reading and ranking the applications for the first fellowship. Devore says they hope to announce the recipient at the spring ACS meeting, to be held in Boston next month. The applicants, including chemical engineers as well as chemists, in general are "very highly motivated," Devore says, and many have "one or more publications under their belt." The committee has received 68 applications, he says - "more than double what we had anticipated, based on [the number of applicants to] other programs. We were elated with the response."

Fellowship Aims To Boost Study In Broad Discipline

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