Emerson's Chris Hamlin joins our continuing podcast series, 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert. Chris works with our Operational Certainty Consulting team in their role to help manufacturers and producers improve operational performance and drive toward top quartile performance.
We'll have an in-depth podcast in the coming weeks with Chris describing this new area of virtually unlimited information flow and what's keeping manufacturers and producers from taking advantage of what's now possible.
https://www.emersonautomationexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Chris-Hamlin-5-Questions.mp3
Transcript
Jim: Hi, this is Jim Cahill, with another edition of "Five Questions for an Emerson Expert." Today we're joined by Chris Hamlin. Chris is a director for our Operational Certainty consulting team and is based in the UK. He received his chemical engineering degree from the University of Cambridge, and an MBA at the Durham Business School. Welcome, Chris.
Chris: Hi, Jim, it's good to be with you.
Jim: Great to be with you, too. So, given your chemical engineering degree, what made you choose to pursue a STEM-based academic degree?
Chris: You know, that's a really interesting question. You know, when I was at school, what we call school in the UK, you know, high school for you guys in the U.S., I was kind of into a bit of everything. I loved, always loved maths, I always loved physics. So I was, kinda had a scientific kind of logical approach to life, but I was also really big into the arts. Theater has continued to be a big love of mine. You know, for a long time I kind of thought about studying English lit rather than physics at school.
But what actually, there was a defining moment, touring around universities, trying to work out what the heck I was gonna do with my life. My best friend from high school always knew he wanted to be a chemical engineer. He wanted to follow in his dad's footsteps. He always wanted to be a chemical engineer. So we went and visited a university, it was actually Birmingham University in the UK. He spent the entire day being dragged around this university by me. We went and visited the English department, the philosophy department, the law department, the economics department, all these kinda cool intellectual things I thought I might fancy doing, as I was trying to make my mind up.
The end of the day, we went to the chem eng department. It was the one thing that he wanted to do, so he'd been patient with me all day, and we sat in the chem eng department, I'll remember to my dying day, watching an experiment. It was a demonstration of the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. Real simple thing. Clear plastic tube, water flowing through the tube, and a little dye injection point. And the realization that at a certain velocity of liquid through that pipe, this thing suddenly went crazy, and then you just slow that water down again, and it goes to perfectly smooth again. I remember just thinking, "That is one of the coolest things I've ever seen. I really need to understand what that is. I really need to understand how that works, and why." And that was the formative moment. From that point onwards, I knew that a chemical engineering degree was the thing I wanted to do.
Jim: Well that's a fascinating story that a visual something there, and you just had to understand exactly how that works. So given that kind of background, what led you into our world of process automation?
Chris: Well, I was lucky enough, I mean, where I lived in the UK, there was kind of the center of the petrochemicals industry for, in Europe, actually. A lot of my friends and the parents of my friends worked for ICI, at the time one of the biggest chemical companies in the world. So ICI, I was lucky enough to get supported by ICI through college and university. And during that process, I kinda learnt a little bit about process automation, process control,