Editorial: UA shakes off the rust — Want to be a corrosion engineer?

Editorial: UA shakes off the rust — Want to be a corrosion engineer?

What does innovation look like?

Visit the College of Engineering at the University of Akron for an answer. You will find the new program in Corrosion and Reliability Engineering, approved a year ago by the university's board of trustees, embarking on its maiden semester in the fall. Here is the nation's first baccalaureate program in corrosion engineering.

The word ''innovation'' praiscrosses the lips of nearly everyone who addresses the transition facing the regional economy. Make new products. Develop new methods. Change the way of doing things, at new levels of sophistication. Innovation involves taking what you have, resources, tools, brainpower, and making novel applications to create something original, whether goods or a process for solving a problem.

What is innovative about a bachelor's degree in Corrosion and Reliability Engineering?

The program takes a unique approach to an old and expensive problem — rust, practically everywhere.

Edward Evans, an associate professor of chemical engineering, took the lead in developing the curriculum. He explains that private industry long has clamored for this degree. Companies find themselves training new engineering hires to deal with corrosion. Better to have universities perform the preparation, patiently, deliberately and fully.

A corrosion engineer must range across the disciplines, tapping into, say, mechanical or civil engineering. He or she must master the science at work, the chemistry of rust. Yet there is another component: Evans stresses that the program includes the development of management skills. Students will be ready to jump into jobs and contribute, armed with knowledge of corrosion and the tools to help their employers intelligently minimize the cost.

These students — the engineering college has in mind roughly two dozen for the first class — will be taught to think strategically and speak persuasively within their companies.

Students will spend significant time actually working in companies. They will be linked globally, similar efforts proceeding in Australia, Britain, Germany and elsewhere.

Will they find jobs?

Corrosion is no small problem. The Government Accountability Office puts the annual cost to the economy at $400 billion. The Defense Department calculates its share at $22 billion a year. The thinking is that the savings could be as high as 30 percent if companies and agencies manage well their corrosion, prolonging the life of bridges, pipelines and the like, liberating tens of billions for other investment.

Industry isn't kidding. Demand exists. The university surveyed the market and found the potential for 1,000 to 1,500 job openings per year, driven partly by company-trained corrosion experts nearing retirement.

Such openings aren't certain. Yet the timing is keen, private and public sectors seeing the need to operate more efficiently and effectively. Timing also helps explain why the University of Akron landed this academic first.

Ask those involved in putting together the program, and they will share the fortunate confluence of events, strengths meshing with opportunity.

Congress and the Defense Department made the first moves, a study revealing the breadth of the problem, a corrosion component built into the Pentagon budget. Mike Baach, the president of Philpott Rubber in Brunswick, heard Luis Proenza speak, and took seriously the UA president's words about the need for collaboration between industry and the university to advance the regional economy.

The next month, Baach had Sue Louscher, once the director of the UA Medina County University Center, sitting in a Pentagon meeting discussing corrosion. Louscher soon became the project director of the university's Corrosion Engineering and Reliability Program. She has been pulling together all of the pieces to turn concept into reality. Helpful has been her earlier experience in Washington, working for the aerospace industry, knowing well the ways of the Pentagon.

It hasn't hurt that Daniel Dunmire, the corrosion czar at the Pentagon, knows Northeast Ohio, born in Youngstown, with a bachelor's degree from Kent State.

George Haritos, the dean of the College of Engineering, leads the fourth fastest-growing engineering program in the country, the interest and direction (polymers and materials science) suggesting a school prepared to offer such a degree. Why not Ohio State? MIT? Or another school with expertise in corrosion? UA benefited from its size. Here, corrosion would be king.

Betty Sutton seized the opening, relentlessly pushing the cause on Capitol Hill, arguing why the program belonged at Akron, the heavy presence of manufacturing, the regional economy looking to make just such leaps. By last summer, the Defense Department had routed $2.32 million to the program.

Perhaps most fortuitous, the corrosion program fit precisely into the thinking of Luis Proenza, the partnership with industry, the spirit of innovation and, more, his vision and ambition for the university. Why UA? Proenza boldly stated: We'll do it!

Soon, Joe Payer, a researcher with a global reputation and ready for a new challenge, departed Case Western Reserve to join the effort. BP (yes, that BP) donated $500,000. Carboline, a subsidiary of RPM International, established a professorship.

Payer compares the corrosion engineering program to a startup company. Any such success story involves good fortune. Experts tell us to build on our strengths. Who would have thought rust would work to our advantage?

This editorial has been republished with the permission of the Akron Beacon Journal.