Measuring Progress Towards Sustainability (PDF)

Subhas Sikdar (retired) was the Associate Director for Science at EPA's National Risk Management Research Laboratory. He received his PhD in chemical engineering from the Univ. of Arizona (1975) and has worked for Occidental Petroleum, General Electric, NIST, and EPA, mostly in R&D management. During his technical career he has authored or coauthored more than 80 journal papers, edited 13 books, and has been awarded 26 U.S. patents. He is a Fellow of AIChE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Indian Institute of Chemical Engineers, and has received AIChE's Research Excellence in Sustainability Award and the Lawrence K. Cecil Award in Environmental Chemical Engineering. He is the founder/editor of Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy and a section editor of Current Opinions in Chemical Engineering.

Dr. Debalina Sengupta (Associate Director, Gas and Fuels Research Center, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station, TX)
Debalina Sengupta obtained a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Chemical Engineering from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, in 2003. In 2010, she earned the Doctor of Philosophy degree in chemical engineering from the Department of Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Her research was on the optimization of industrial complexes and sustainability analysis using Total Cost Assessment Methodology. Following this, her first book titled "Chemicals from biomass: integrating bioprocesses into chemical production complexes for sustainable development" was published by CRC Press in the Green Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Series in 2012. After her PhD, she worked at the National Risk Management Research Laboratory of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, Cincinnati, OH as an ORISE Post Doctoral Fellow in the Sustainable Technology Division. Her research at the EPA was focused on Sustainable Supply Chain Design of Biofuels and Consumer Products, and