Hello Reddit! My name is Andrew Zydney, and I am currently Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. I also serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Membrane Science and I am on the Board of Directors of the North American Membrane Society. I am very much looking forward to my first time participating in Reddit.
Just to provide some background, I obtained my B.S. from Yale in 1980 and a PhD from MIT in 1985, both in Chemical Engineering. I then joined the faculty at the University of Delaware in 1985 before moving to Penn State in 2002. I served as Head of the Chemical Engineering Department here at Penn State from 2004-2014; I am very much enjoying being back as a “regular faculty member” since stepping down as Department Head.
My research interests are in membrane science and technology, with a particular focus on the application of membranes in both bioprocessing (e.g., for the purification of biopharmaceuticals) and biomedicine. The latter has included extensive work on the use of membranes in the artificial kidney, commonly referred to as hemodialysis, as well as the possibility of developing an implantable bioartificial kidney. Some of our work on the implantable artificial kidney is available in the online paper http://ift.tt/2m7RD8w.
Note that I am not a medical doctor – I am a chemical engineer who is particularly interested in the development of membrane-based technologies that can have a significant impact in the treatment of disease. I do collaborate with clinicians, and also with medical technology companies, on a regular basis, both as a consultant and on research projects.
Please don’t hesitate to ask me anything about some of the research I’ve described above or more generally about hemodialysis and the artificial kidney. I look forward to our conversation!
I’ll be back at 12 noon ET (9 am PT, 5pm UTC) to answer specific questions.
I recently received $467,000 from two federal grants to launch a community based participatory research study to understand the challenges and success factors for autistic people in the workplace. The study focuses on skilled or professional employment, rather than entry level positions. This study is personal for me. My path to career success included overcoming discrimination, multiple career shifts, and experiences with a disability services system often ill-equipped to provide support in skilled settings. My study will seek to understand what helps autistic people do well professionally, and develop a plan to improve professional outcomes.
I will be back at 7 pm ET to answer your questions, ask me anything!
I’m a historian of science, technology, the environment, and American capitalism. I have a PhD from MIT's program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, where my research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. My dissertation, "Inventing Purity in the Atlantic Sugar World, 1860-1930," was awarded prizes in 2015 for the best dissertation in business history in both the U.S. and Britain, and his work has been published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of British Studies, and Enterprise & Society, while another article is forthcoming in Radical History Review.
I’m currently a visiting scholar at UVA and working on my first book Purity and Power in the American Sugar Empire, 1860-1940, which narrates a new history of U.S. imperialism by tracing material struggles over knowledge about sugar’s substance and value.
Drawing on research in U.S., Cuban, and Hawaiian archives, Purity and Power shows how the U.S’s attempts to govern nature and human labor in its Pacific and Caribbean colonies were inseparable from contests over corruption, free trade, and corporate power at home. I’m also preparing an article about food, labor, and scientific knowledge in the 1880s and 1890s, examining scandals over the smuggling of frozen Canadian herring into Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Before this, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis and a research associate at Harvard Business School.
Ask me anything about the history of science or technology!
