Appendix - E
Questions and Issues Discussed by the Breakout Groups
Technical – Where are the frontiers of polymer processing?
- What do we know? What do we know that
we don’t know?
What do we need to know? What is our wish list?
- What are the boundaries of our field?
- Which are the relevant related disciplines?
- What is the critical mass of a research team?
- How can we make our field a ‘strategic’ part of the chain of knowledge?
Science, Technology and Policy Issues
- Are we at a turning point?
- Are we moving towards “macromolecular technology” or “macromolecular process
science” or “macromolecular engineering”?
- Is the field a subset of the larger domain of “soft material” or
“complex fluids”.
- Can it be that both chemical engineering and polymer engineering converge toward
the age of “molecular and supramolecular engineering”, out of which “chemical molecular
engineering”, macromolecular engineering” and biomacromolecular engineering” branch out?
- What should a core curriculum be?
- What are the “toolboxes” of tomorrow?
- What should the structure of future research in the multidisciplinary environment
be?
- How to attract students to these fields?
Policy Implications
- What should the nature of a government-industry-academia alliance be?
- What should the recommended funding policies be?
- What should the information dissemination policies in view of the envisaged
changes be?
- What effect the new scene has on research collaboration on the national and international
level?
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