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Dr. William Josephson
Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering

Department of Chemical Engineering
Tel: 334.844.2483
Fax: 334.844.2063

Office Address
149 Ross Hall

Mailing Address
212 Ross Hall
Auburn University, AL 36849-5127


A Short Intro

    I am a full-time faculty member of Auburn’s Chemical Engineering Department. I have an equal mix of industrial and academic experience; my industrial experiences were in the pulp & paper industries. My research interests continue to be pulp & paper related. I also have an interest in the topic of engineering education: I have helped to revamp curriculums at the institutions I have been associated with and am deeply involved in teaching the use of practical methodologies to our students. I really enjoy the teaching aspects of my job and am active in assisting various Outreach efforts such as A.U.'s TIGERs camps and the BEST robotics competitions.

Recent Publications & Presentations

    I made 3 presentations at the 2007 AIChE Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah:
      Food Experiments in the Unit Operations Lab - co-authors were M. Biswas, L. Kelley & D. Mills - This presentation looked at the various experiments dealing with food that have lately been a part of the CHEN 3820 course. I started off by talking about the efforts of the Fall '06 class in which 3 groups proposed novel experiments dealing with food. After slide 21 of the presentation I then rapidly (very rapidly!) went through this presentation. The 2nd presentation is what Group Foxtrot (Spring '07) had proposed as a food experiment. After going through the 15 slides of their presentation I then returned to slide 22 of the 1st slide show. On slide 22 I made my obligatory pun when I talked about 'My Expectations': I said that with the butter experiment I expect more background, chemistry type material in the reports because the students don't churn out very much data. Get it? Get it? Anyway, I spent the remainder of the presentation discussing how the Summer '07 and Fall '07 groups had implemented the butter experiment.
      Explosive Decompression in the Unit Operations Lab - sounds scary but this was about our Mentos & Diet Coke experiment.
      When Things Go Wrong - sounds even scarier! This presentation looked at 4 cases in which things did not go as planned during the junior level lab courses at Tuskegee and Auburn. My co-authors were J. Krishnagopalan & D. Mills.
    In 2007 I also made a presentation at Tuskegee University's annual TUBE conference:
      Getting To Know You... (You & Your Calculator) - the typical engineering calculator of today costs about $100 and is more powerful than the personal computers that were on the scene when I was an undergrad; in this talk I explained some of the usually untapped features of the calculators used by engineering students

Some Stuff That Interests Me

    Go On A Tiger Hunt At one time (2000 or 2001) the city of Auburn tried to emulate cities that have a bunch of animal sculptures of a single theme; you know, like the cows that roam urban pastures. Anyway, despite Auburn's reputation as a cow college, it was decided to build tiger sculptures and make them available for various groups to customize them as they pleased. Some interesting and other not-so-interesting designs resulted and the statues were all placed in the Toomer's Corner area. All well and good until various tigers were stolen, vandalized, you get the picture. I think that there was one house of students that was caught with 5 tigers in their possession. Anyway, the powers that be decided that it would be a good idea to relocate the tigers to more secure pastures. So, if you see a tiger statue now it's likely to be in a location that's a) not easily accessible (like the roof of the high school) or b) somewhat guarded (like outside the city fire department). If you ever pay a visit to Auburn keep your eyes open and see how many of these tigers can you find?

    UPDATE - In 2009 a couple of our chemical engineering students decided to beat me at my own game; in addition to the tigers that I found they did a lot of legwork and tracked down 6 more tigers. They were even written up in a local paper. Pretty impressive, Zach and Collyn. I've stolen their photos and added them to my page.
    As of August 2009 I have pictures of at least 18 tiger statues on this web site. Eagle-eyed viewers will note 20 different pictures; one of the tigers was repainted & installed in another location. Another tiger (the Lovelace Museum one) is temporarily unavailable for public viewing but may in fact be shown in one of the other pictures.

    A Paratrooper's Faith Images of and the text from the classic "little book" given out to our nation's paratroopers

    2008 Halloween Every year our student chapter of AIChE hosts a Halloween party; I went as Anton Chigurh. The Diet Coke bottle is an inside joke referencing our Lab I experiment.

    Football Stadia Here's a link to a map I've created showing the football stadia I've seen college games in. The map was created in and is hosted by platial.com; I'm currently trying to upgrade the user-friendliness of it.

    Henchman's Helper Everybody knows that villains bent on world domination (like Dr Evil) need to have a huge screen in their lair showing information streaming in from all over the planet. It's nice to know that the pendulum in Ross Hall is apparently important enough to be included. Here's proof.


A shot of Tiger VI, Auburn's flying mascot, in action before the Ole Miss game of 8 SEP 01


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The contents of this site were last changed in August of 2009