The Cornell School of Chemical Engineering is celebrating the career of retiring professor Ferdinand Rodriguez with a symposium on Friday, Oct. 15, from 1:30 to 5 p.m. in 165 Olin Hall. The symposium is free and open to the public.

The speakers, all Cornell graduates, will be: Erdogan Kiran, the Gottesman Research Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Maine, who will talk on "Polymer Solutions at High Pressures — Miscibility and Kinetics of Phase Separation in and near Supercritical Fluids"; Montgomery Shaw, professor of chemical engineering at the University of Connecticut, who will speak on "Polymer Gels with Strong Electrorheological Activity"; Robert van Brederode, executive director of the Polymers Center of Excellence in Charlotte, N.C., who will present a talk titled "It Doesn't Work," about helping manufacturers who do not have the staff, expertise, facilities or equipment to develop new products or operate successfully in today's competitive international marketplace; and Leland Vane from the National Risk Management Research Laboratory at the Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, Ohio, who will speak about "How Pervaporation Saved the World," focusing on the recycling of soil remediation fluids using membrane-based pervaporation.

Rodriguez is retiring after 41 years of teaching polymers and other chemical engineering courses and conducting research on the synthesis, properties and applications of polymers. He studied chemical engineering at Case Institute of Technology, receiving a B.S. in 1950 and a M.S. in 1954 while working as a research engineer and director of product development for Ferro Chemical in Bedford, Ohio. He served two years in the U.S. Army Chemical Corps after being drafted, and he entered graduate school at Cornell in 1956. His Ph.D. thesis project for polymer pioneer Charles C. Winding, Cornell professor of chemical engineering, was on the mechanical degradation of polymers.

Rodriguez advised 21 Ph.D. students and 34 M.S. students. He is the author of more than 120 technical publications. His textbook, Principles of Polymer Systems, is in its fourth edition, one of which has been translated into Spanish. He has been the recipient of the Cornell Society of Engineers Excellence in Teaching Award, the Dean's Excellence in Teaching Award and the Hispanic Engineer National Achievement, Education-Research Award. Rodriguez is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and a member of the American Chemical Society, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society of Plastics Engineers. He is on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Applied Polymer Science and has been faculty adviser to the Cornell student chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers for the past 16 years. He has conducted research at Queen Mary College of the University of London, Eastman Kodak, Imperial Chemical Industries and Union Carbide.