Roger Sargent (chemical engineer)

In addition to the awards he has gained, an award has been named in his honour: in October 2014 the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) created the Roger Sargent medal for "research in computer-aided product and process engineering". In 2019-2020, Computers & Chemical Engineering developed a special issue in memory and honor of him.

He is known principally as one of the earliest creators of the discipline of Process Systems Engineering, and his influence has been extremely widely spread among that community, by his research and also by his extraordinarily large family tree (Academic genealogy) of research students. In his career at Imperial College he supervised 61 research students, and several of these first-generation students have gone on to establish large research schools of their own. By 2008, this family tree extended to seven generations and 639 students and former students. By 2016 this had grown to over 2,000 students and former students.

Since 1994 his influence is commemorated in the annual "Roger Sargent" lectures at Imperial College.

His research and academic contributions have been recognised through a series of prestigious honours, including founder-fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1976), honorary fellowship of the City and Guilds of London Institute (1977), Silver Medal of the "Ville de Paris" (1986), Doctor honoris causa of the Institut National Polytechnique de Lorraine (1987) and of the University of Liège (1995), Fellow of Imperial College (1990), Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Richard W. Wilhelm Lectureship of Princeton University (1994), distinguished research lectureship in chemical engineering of Carnegie Mellon University (1996) and the Nordic Process Control Award (2003). The American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChemE) awarded him the 1990 'Computing in Chemical Engineering' award The Institution of Chemical Engineers awarded him the inaugural MM Sharma medal in 2015. In September 2016 the Royal Academy of Engineering awarded him the Sir Frank Whittle Medal. The Sir Frank Whittle Medal is awarded to an engineer resident in the UK whose outstanding and sustained achievements have had a profound impact on their engineering discipline.

His software "SPEEDUP" (Simulation Programme for the Economic Evaluation and Design of Unsteady-State Processes) was first described in publication in 1964, and this package was widely used in research and industry more than 25 years later.

In particular he was vigorous in promoting that the operation and control of a chemical plant were important and worthy subjects to be taught (previously these had been thought to be the responsibility of semi-skilled operators,not professional engineers), and that the new computers and numerical methods should be fundamental to undergraduate chemical engineering education (this was in 1963). He always pushed for the highest degree of competence in all his students; the computer was never to be used as a way of avoiding important issues:

Sargent distinguished himself as an active member of several national and international corporations, namely the Institution of Chemical Engineers, which he joined in 1960 and where he became a president in 1973, and also the Science Research Council, the Council of Engineering Institutions, the European Federation of Chemical Engineering, the Ministry of Technology, the Department of Trade and Industry, the University Grants Committee, the University Funding Council, the British Council and the British-French Mixed Cultural Commission, amongst others, where he acted as a member of several boards and committees.

Roger William Herbert Sargent FREng FSA (14 October 1926 – 11 September 2018) was an English chemical engineer who was Courtaulds professor of Chemical engineering at Imperial College London and "the father" of the discipline of Process Systems Engineering.

Born on 14 October 1926, Sargent was educated at Bedford School and at Imperial College London where he received a BSc and a PhD in chemical engineering. He worked for Air Liquide in Paris as a practising engineer until 1959 when he returned to the UK and subsequently joined Imperial College as a lecturer. He described those war years and post-war France in his address to the University of Edinburgh. His career advanced and he was made Courtaulds professor of Chemical engineering at Imperial College London between 1966 and 1992, Dean of the City and Guilds College from 1973 to 1976, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1975 to 1988 and director of the Centre for Process Systems Engineering (which he founded) from its launch in August 1989 until his retirement in 1992, when he became a senior research fellow and emeritus professor in the centre and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Engineering.