Mahmoud El-Halwagi's office in the department of chemical engineering's wing in Ross Hall attracts students the way a harbor attracts boats. Maybe in the same way. They come in a constant stream, load up and return on their separate courses.
They don't come for steel, oil or soybeans. They come for ideas, concepts, clarification and direction. And five times in the past seven they have named this harbor master as the most important influence in their life - winner of the outstanding faculty member award, consecutively over the past three years.
"Don't ask me why," El-Halwagi grins. "They come and accuse me of destroying their social lives, of ruining their sleep."
But they have come back later as well - as graduates beginning careers in industry - and thanked him for his part in making their dreams come true.
Low key and quietly self-assured, El Halwagi has structured his own career at Auburn by placing his students first. He came to Auburn directly from UCLA, where he earned his doctorate, and is a native of Egypt, where he received his undergraduate and master's degrees in chemical engineering.
A recipient last year of the Birdsong Teaching Award, the college's highest honor for instructional excellence, El-Halwagi is known for his prolific research as well, and is the recipient of the National Science Foundation's young investigators award.
"Teaching and research are complementary in nature," he says, pointing to the recent publication of a textbook on pollution prevention that he authored.
"Eighty percent of the text was written by learning how to put concepts forward in a systematic way to students in the classroom," he explains. "Their feedback told me what worked and what didn't. Developing the text in this way has greatly improved the clarity of my writing."
El-Halwagi further notes that working on the text reinforced his perception that teaching, research, and engineering share a common methodology - breaking problems into tractable tasks.
"This is what I try to teach my students," he adds.
"I like teaching undergraduates not so much as a conduit for information - which, while important to acquire, is often forgotten, to be honest - but to train their minds how to think.
"This is what gives our students the ability to be flexible, and gives them value in the marketplace, where technology changes so rapidly from year to year. It's particularly valuable in graduate school as well, because students are expected to break new ground in research there."
El-Halwagi's own research is a reflection of his focus on systematic techniques in problem solving.
"My own area - pollution prevention - has been treated as more of an art than a science, depending primarily on experience and subjective opinion," El Halwagi explains. "My interest is in taking it toward fundamental engineering principles that involve process integration."
Central to his thinking is a shift from end-of-pipe pollution treatment to full-system solutions that treat pollution at the source and also tackles effluents such as volatile compounds as commercial products.
"By reducing or diverting volatile compounds at the front end of the system, costs are minimized, and stringent new EPA regulations are more easily met. The fact that there is a very high value in some of these components can result in an even greater benefit."
The immediacy of research results is one of its greatest draws, El-Halwagi says of chemical engineering.
"We are often dealing in huge volumes of commodities, and even 3 percent in savings can result in millions of dollars of revenue," he comments. "Alabama has a large industrial base in chemical engineering, and as a state we stand to benefit greatly from this kind of research."
He notes too that paring costs is an absolute necessity in industries such as plastics and pulp and paper, where competition is fierce.
"I think it should be mentioned too that in the kind of research that we are conducting, involving huge operations, industry is in fact our laboratory," he adds. "This is a reality that is particularly beneficial to students, because it involves them in field-level work very early in their careers.
"Feedback becomes almost instantaneous. We can't do process design independent of real situations in industry, or ignore where industrial requirements are going."
At the same time, he suggests, the role of the university is also to take a step back from investor-driven quarterly results and look at the long-term health of industry.
"Knowing what takes place in industry is one side of the equation," he explains. "Knowing where industry should be going is the other."
El-Halwagi's deep involvement in his research efforts, coupled to his devotion to his students seemingly leaves little time for anything else.
"Well, I have two children of my own," he says of Omar, eight, and Ali, five. "I make room for my home life. I'm also active in Auburn's Muslim community, which is important to me.
"Auburn is a very attractive place to raise them, and I hope to be here for the next 20 years. At that point I still want to be very involved in my students. Very involved in my research.
"And," he grins, "I'd like to have a little hair left."