The January issue of CJCE, which is currently free-to-read, is packed with excellent content, including a special section honouring John Ross Grace, organized by guest editors Xiaotao Bi, Roland Clift, Naoko Ellis, and Charles Haynes from the University of British Columbia. This special issue section contains 18 articles, many from Dr. Grace’s former students and colleagues, on the topics of energy, fluidization and fluid-particle systems, and chemical engineering perspectives.
In the preface to this special section, the guest editors note that Dr. Grace was “one of the leading chemical engineers in Canada and an international figure in fluidization and fluid-particle systems” and they provide the timeline of his incredible career from receiving a BESc in Chemical Engineering from the University of Western Ontario in 1965, establishing the UBC Fluidization Research Centre in 1997, being invested as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2014, and being inducted into the UBC Chemical and Biological Engineering Hall of Fame in 2021—the first person to receive this honour, as they note. “Without being assertive, John set standards for personal and professional performance—his intellectual and ethical standards made him a role model for younger academics throughout Canada and more widely.” Be sure to read this special issue section, containing articles, 7 of which are open access, from researchers in Canada, China, Italy, Korea, Sweden, Japan, The Netherlands, the US, and the UK, and learn more about the significant impact Dr. Grace had on the field.
The CSChE has established a new award in Dr. Grace’s honour as well: the John R. Grace Award, sponsored by the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The University of British Columbia, and GLAB Reactor and Fluidization Technologies Inc. Nomination information can be found in the Terms of Reference on the John R. Grace Award page.
This issue also features the first article in a new special series: Systems and Control Division Special Series, guest edited by Thomas A. Adams II. This special series will include invited papers from the CSChE’s System and Control Division, the first few of which, from the 2021 CCEC conference in Montreal, “highlight some of the interesting diversity of research going on within the division, including how the field is starting to move into non-traditional application areas, such as medicine and global health”, as stated by Dr. Adams in the preface. Dr. Adams also includes in the preface a call for papers from CCEC 2022 in Vancouver: “We encourage everyone providing a contribution to the conference in the Systems and Control division to submit extended abstracts to this year’s conference proceedings.” Be sure to access the first article in this series, also this issue’s Editor’s Choice article, by Fatir Qureshi and Juergen Hahn, titled “Towards the development of a diagnostic test for autism spectrum disorder: Big data meets metabolomics”.