Chemical Engineering Overview - PowerPoint - Podcast

	B.S. - Chemical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley M.S. - Civil Engineering, Stanford
	Program manager in the corporate environmental management department
	"Going back and getting the advanced degree has more than paid for itself, from a financial standpoint, as well as from a personal growth and a professional standpoint."

Rego: My name is Al Rego. I work in the corporate environmental management department at Hewlett-Packard. I work on environmental health and safety assessments and audits. We go out and speak to general managers and line managers at each of our manufacturing sites and assess the maturity of their environmental health and safety programs. I also work on developing, rolling out, and communicating ergonomics information throughout the country. One of our major initiatives in HP this year and next year is a health and safety initiative-increasing awareness of ergonomics and the role that ergonomics plays in our work environment.

Q: What does a chemical engineer do with health and safety and ergonomics?
Rego: Most of the skills that I'm using are the process skills that you learn in chemical engineering. Not so much from a chemical process standpoint, but the process way of thinking-the engineering method of how you develop programs, how you think logically through what needs to be accomplished, and what are the steps that it takes to get to that point in a logical progression. You then apply that in a business sense. So rather than looking at what your end product has to be in terms of a chemical plant, you determine what your end product needs to be in terms of a business outcome, and step back through the steps that are going to get you to that point.

Q: Does your work focus on a specific product or product line?
Rego: We really don't concentrate on the product lines at HP per se. What we look at are the methodologies and the mechanisms that are in place to protect HP employees, the communities, and the environment. We look at the health and safety and environmental programs. We're looking to ensure that each of our manufacturing sites has programs in place to ensure that management is aware of potential issues that deal with environmental health and safety issues. We are an integral part of the communities in which we operate. As part of that, we want to make sure that our operations are safe and environmentally sound. We also try to make sure that our products are environmentally sound. We have a group, comprised of representatives of each of our business lines, that is coordinated through the department that I work in. It looks at our products and makes sure that they are safe. I'm not involved myself with that group. I'm more involved with looking incrementally at our safety programs at our sites, auditing our sites, and working with the general managers to help them understand what the status of their programs are and how they can improve. When I started working at HP, I was looking at some of the remediation problems that we were facing. Along with most of the other companies in the electronics industry, practices in the 1950s and 1960s, which were standard industry practices at that time, led to some unfortunate instances of environmental contamination. One of my initial jobs at HP was looking at those situations and helping to expedite them so that we don't have any lingering contamination.

Q: What kind of technical skills did you use when you looked at those remediations?
Rego: A lot of basic chemistry, basic chemical engineering-Henry's Law, Raoul's Law. In looking at the type of contamination we were dealing with and how that contamination interacts with the environment, I used a lot of geochemistry to determine the interaction of those chemicals with the soils and identify the types of soils we were dealing with. From that aspect, there was a lot of application of chemical principles. There was also application of chemical engineering in the solutions. By far the most prevalent solution to ground water contamination, for example, is pump and treat. Pump it out of the ground, treat it with some mechanism at the surface, and either discharge it at the surface or re-inject it. The treatment process is a chemical engineering process. Either you're doing carbon absorption or you're doing air stripping or something along those lines. So there are applications of chemical engineering principles to those aspects of remediation.

Q: Who do you work with on a day-to-day basis?
Rego: Our teams are aligned to bring together the skills of various people. I could be working on some projects with attorneys-I do a lot of work with attorneys. I work with toxicologists. I work with biologists. It depends on what the particular problem is. When I talk about remediation, the group that I worked with consisted of geologists, chemists, people with regulatory backgrounds, legals, both paralegals and inside counsel, and outside counsel. I also did a lot of contractor management. I think the biggest part of my job was managing contractors.

Q: Are there any courses that you wish you had taken in college?
Rego: There are a lot of skills I would've liked to have gained. I'm not sure that the courses that I would like to have taken were available. I didn't know to look. The things I would have liked to have been better at are negotiation skills for contracts and contractor management skills. Those are things that I ended up learning on the job. They are things that prove very valuable once you have them in your repertoire. They are the reason that I'm working at HP today. I had those skills when I came here-I was hired for those skills. My technical background was important because it enabled me to represent HP in developing the solutions to some of its remediation problems with the contractors. The contractors proposed things, and I had to work with them from a management standpoint, as well as making sure that what they were proposing-from a technical standpoint-was the right thing to do.

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