Roger Sargent (chemical engineer)

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. Sargent died on 11 September 2018. Roger Sargent became a professor at Imperial College at an important point in the development of his profession. He was very aware of this, and that his experience of eight years as a practising engineer at Air Liquide in Paris gave him a particular insight into how the subject should be taught: "the concept of the engineer that I have been trying to build up, and it is precisely the combination of a high degree of competence, and the quantitative approach, with a wider social consciousness and the ability to view problems in their context, that is so valuable" (Inaugural Lecture, 1963). 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).