Foreword: The Richard J. Fruehan Symposium on Physical Chemistry of Sustainable Metal Processing

Dick’s scientific career spans more than four decades. He began his career as a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania under the guidance of Professor G.R. Belton. He then became a postdoctoral researcher under Professor F.D. Richardson at Imperial College. From London he moved to Pittsburgh and joined US Steel where he worked with Dr. E.T. Turkdogan and Dr. L.S. Darken. After the demise of the Bain Fundamental Research Laboratory in Monroeville, he joined Carnegie Mellon University as a professor and built and directed the world renown Center for Iron and Steelmaking Research (CISR), which started as an NSF (National Science Foundation)-University-IndustryResearch Center with a handful of companies but grew to include more than 20 national and international companies. In many ways it is a model of how academic research with hypothesis-driven questions leading to doctoral dissertations can be integrated with long-term industrial problems concerning the physical chemistry of iron and steelmaking which is critical for sustainability and resource management. He currently is the co-director of the CISR and the US Steel Professor of Iron and Steelmaking within the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He is also an editor of MMTB (Metallurgical and Materials Transactions B).