For a generation, too many chemical plants have blundered along with skeleton staffs barely able to cope with critical filtration tasks. Meanwhile, American universities continue to lag behind Europe and Japan in training tomorrow＇s engineers in filtration. Dr. Frank M. Tiller, noted University of Houston professor and founding member of the American Filtration and Separation Society (AFS) put it this way: "During 20 years of teaching short courses involving 1,000 engineers from industry, I encountered only one individual with a theoretical background in my specialized area of solid-liquid separation".