Research contributions of Leo A. Behie to chemical and biomedical engineering

Abstract

Leo Augustus Behie was known as a dedicated teacher and mentor, a team builder, and an outstanding researcher and innovator. He had a most productive and illustrious career, spanning five decades, that covered both industrial and academic sectors. His academic research career started with tackling classical chemical engineering challenges and, with time, shifted to biotechnology and biomedical engineering. He was the founding director of a unique research laboratory for undertaking innovative biotechnology and biomedical engineering research at the University of Calgary, called the Pharmaceutical Production Research Facility (PPRF). This paper presents an overview of his academic and research accomplishments, which also included the training of 17 doctoral students, 21 master's degree students, and many postdoctoral scholars. His main research areas under the classical chemical engineering theme included the investigation of the grid region in gas–solid fluidized bed reactors; gas–liquid and liquid–solid multiphase systems; fluidized bed reactors for metals recovery from coal ash; spouted fluid‐bed reactors; kinetics of pyrolysis chemical reactions; transport phenomena in rotary drums; and reactions, thermodynamics, and reactor modelling of sulphur systems. His main research areas under the biotechnology and biomedical engineering theme included advances in biotechnology and bioreactor design; production of antibiotic and monoclonal antibody; protein production in insect cells; process development for the production of neural stem cells, cancer stem cells, and islet cells; mesenchymal stem cells; and cellular secretome studies aimed at developing a cure for Parkinson's disease.