Commemorating Timothy McKenna's 60th Birthday

Abstract

I am pleased to celebrate the 60^th birthday of our colleague and friend, Tim McKenna, in this special issue of Macromolecular Reaction Engineering (MRE). I am also thrilled that I am not the only one to reach this milestone, even though I preceded him by a couple of years. Welcome to the club, old man.

The number and scope of articles submitted to this special MRE issue reflect Tim's many accomplishments in polymer reaction engineering. Tim is the Director of Research of CP2M/CNRS and a Professor at CPE-Lyon in Villeurbanne, France. Tim's research program applies chemical engineering tools to understand, quantify, and control polymerization reactors, focusing on polyolefins and specialized latex products. He has published 269 peer-reviewed articles, 12 book chapters, 1 authored book, and is listed as an inventor in 6 patents. Tim has also given many keynote lectures and invited presentations in international conferences, and supervised a multitude of graduate students who are currently contributing to different areas of polymer science and engineering. He has also organized several international conferences, most notably Incorep (International Conference on the Reaction Engineering of Polyolefins), previously known as Ecorep (European Conference on the Reaction Engineering of Polyolefins), which will become the Blue Sky-Incorep conference in 2023, combining by the first time aspects of polyolefin chemistry, catalysis, and reaction engineering. Tim is also highly sought after as a consultant and as an expert witness for the polymer industry.

I was lucky to meet Tim when we were still at the beginning of our academic careers. If memory doesn't fail me—as it's prone to do after one's 60^th birthday—we first met in 1997, in Palm Coast, Florida, while attending Polymer Reaction Engineering III. Tim was interested on improving single particle models for olefin polymerization, focusing on intraparticle transport phenomena, particle morphology development, and thermodynamic equilibrium, while I was integrating polymerization kinetics and microstructural characterization methods to better understand olefin polymerization with coordination catalysts. Luckily for us, our research interests superimposed just enough to foster collaboration but not to trigger the shadow of competition that haunts young academics. This first meeting led to a lifelong collaboration—including our book, Polyolefin Reaction Engineering, and a series of open and in-house industrial short courses—allowing us to visit most major polyolefin manufacturing companies and travel the world together.

But I suspect that work alone would not be enough to maintain our friendship over the years. Research interests aside, Tim and I are both liberal humanists who share a love for single malts, good wines, long dinners capped with perhaps a few too many poires, and an irreverent sense of humor. Above all, we don't confuse being serious about our work with taking ourselves too seriously.

It has been a privilege to have met a friend like Tim at the beginning of my career. I generally don't admit this in public, and never in his presence, but I have learned and benefited much from his expertise over these almost 30 years of collaboration.

For all your many achievements and enduring friendship, I would like to raise a toast to you, my old friend, and wish you a very happy 60^th birthday on behalf of all the authors in this special issue. I look forward to working with you until both of us forget what a bivariate distribution is. (But, have you ever really understood it, Tim?)

Tim Mckenna and I (the older-looking guy is Tim) in 2017, experiencing a Game of Thrones moment in Sonoma Valley, irresponsibly skipping a few talks during Advances in Polyolefins.