Dr. Robert C. Weaver has served for fifteen years as Vice?President, Technical Director and Chief Risk Management Officer for International Matex Tank Terminals with responsible oversight for affiliated companies in New Jersey, Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, Illinois and California, in the provinces of Quebec and Newfoundland in Canada, and a partner in the management firm for the U.S.Strategic Petroleum Reserve. During this period he also served on the Board of Directors of Compania Mexicana de Transportes operating four marine terminals in Mexico and as a liaison officer within the partnership with the Dutch firm Royal Van Ommerren, NV.

Dr. Weaver's corporate responsibilities included oversight of company activities in engineering and regulatory compliance, insurance procurement and claims management, new venture risk assessment, project design and evaluation, and human resource management (health, disability, retirement plan oversight) and employee training. He oversaw a full range of environmental challenges as his company moved to rehabilitate a number of historically distressed operations. He was responsible for the implementation of ISO 9002 certification at all of the company's operations and is active in ISO 14001 certification efforts.

Earlier, Dr. Weaver served as Dean of Engineering at the University of Tennessee following his tenure as professor and Head of the Department of Chemical and Management Engineering at Tulane University. He served as Associate Director for Science and Engineering at Gulf South Research Institute and as a visiting professor at MIT (1976) and Fulbright/NATO professor in Ecuador (1971), Chile (1982), Germany (TU Nurnberg and Darmstadt), and TU Trondheim, Norway (1970). He is multilingual in seven languages.

Academically, Dr. Weaver's doctorate is in chemical engineering (and economics) from Princeton. He is the author of over seventy reviewed publications in automation, process simulation, plant and animal physiology, and energy/environmental technology and economics and directed some twenty PhD dissertations. He presently is an author for the RedVector series of web-based training to assist professional engineers in meeting continuing education requirements for licensure. He is a resident of the State of Louisiana and has served as Executive Aide to the Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources (during two state administrations). In this part?time role, he carried lead responsibility for the formulation, promulgation and staffing of federally?accredited hazardous wastes (RCRA) and PSD air quality programs; he conducted public hearings for the state's implementation of these new environmental regulations and repeatedly represented the Department before legislative committees. Dr. Weaver has been a consultant to the U.S.Department of Agriculture (crop productivity), to the VA Hospital System (cardiovascular and renal physiology), to the U.S.Army Corps of Engineers (Lake Pontchartrain watershed hydrologic modeling), to Ethyl and Exxon Corporations (process automation), and most recently to the National Research Council (on the vulnerability of the chemical industry to terrorist acts). He has authored a series of Economic Atlases for the state legislature addressing the consequences of changing energy and environmental circumstances leading up to successful econometric forecasting in electric energy demand and world oil pricing.

Dr. Weaver was American Delegate to the International Federation of Automatic Control and was a founding member and president of CACHE, Inc. a spin?off of a National Academy of Engineering committee on computer supported chemical engineering education. He served on the Fulbright review committee for Latin America and the Board of Trustees of Omicron Delta Kappa, campus leadership fraternity. He is a licensed professional engineer in California, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, New Jersey, Tennessee and Virginia and a senior member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has been serving for the last six years as a program reviewer for the North American Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology. He is also an author in the RedVector series of web-based continuing education courses.

Dr. Weaver is Vice-Chairman of the Board for the Camps Leelanau/Kohahna Foundation--operating children's camps in Northern Michigan and serves on the President's Advisory Board for Northwest Michigan College. In 1977-78, he chaired the federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

Presentation Topic : The Environment, Energy and the Economy:
Engineering Discipline for a Legal Playground.

By: Robert C. Weaver, Ph.D., P.E.

The husbandry of energy and environmental resources while maintaining a vibrant free economy is essential to the well-being of American citizens and to the preservation of the high standard of living this nation has earned.

Engineers have a central role to play here in response to challenges and in the consistent formulation of policy. It is a role which should be proactive without deferring to self-anointed elites. This will call for familiarity with legal and economic details along with the broader scientific perspective that has always been engineering's "stock and trade".

A illustrative chronicle of recent decades is given illustrating where good engineering participation would have been helpful in blunting aberrations triggered by "junk science" and the flinch mentality of the legal fraternity.

A tutorial is sketched on specific curricular elements which will help develop a responsive perspective among rising engineers even the time that this is summoned in ABET 2000 accreditation criteria.

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