It is with great pleasure that CO-LaN congratulates Dr William BARRETT for achieving the senior level position of Senior Research Engineer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, within the Office of Research and Development (ORD), Center for Environmental Solutions and Emergency Response (CESER), Land Remediation and Technology Division (LRTD), Environmental Decisions Analytics Branch (EDAB).

While the process through which the Technical Qualification Board gathered at US EPA reviewed the work and promotion qualification of Dr BARRETT remains confidential, CO-LaN sincerely hopes that the impressive work Bill carried out on CAPE-OPEN over the last 15 years or so had some weight in the promotion decision.

Just a few reminders:

Bill was directly instrumental in organizing the first CAPE-OPEN public conference in the U.S., later designated as the 1st CAPE-OPEN US Conference on August 24-25, 2005. Dr Bertrand BRAUNSCHWEIG, then President of CO-LaN, and Dr Michel PONS, CO-LaN Chief Technology Officer, made presentations there as well as many other organizations did plus the conference was well attended in Cincinnati, Ohio. It gave credibility and visibility to CO-LaN and CAPE-OPEN in the U.S., leading to a recognition through AIChE for example.

Bill served as instructor to several training courses organized by CO-LaN in Europe and the U.S., for example at the CAPE-OPEN 2007 Annual Meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, at the AIChE 2007 Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the CAPE-OPEN 2008 Annual Meeting in Cambridge, UK, at the CAPE-OPEN 2009 Annual Meeting in Freising, Germany and the latest one at the CAPE-OPEN 2016 Annual Meeting in Pullach, Germany,

Bill developed a CAPE-OPEN Processing Modelling Environment relying on CAPE-OPEN for its architecture and interoperability: the Metal Finishing Facility Pollution Prevention Tool (MFFP2T), for the metal finishing industry. This work was presented in a paper at ESCAPE-13 and later published in Computer Aided Chemical Engineering.

Bill received the CAPE-OPEN 2008 Award in recognition of his activity to ease the use of the CAPE-OPEN standard by the industry.

Bill developed with Jasper van BATEN the initial concepts of the CAPE-OPEN Flowsheet Monitoring interface specification and prototyped an implementation of it

Bill has been the leader of the Methods & Tools Special Interest Group at CO-LaN since October 2009. The Methods & Tools SIG has developed and released an impressive list of Errata & Clarifications documents, the Flowsheet Monitoring interface specification and is supervising the COBIA development project.

And the list is not ending here.

Once again, congratulations to Bill!