Preface of the Brazilian Congress on Chemical Engineering (COBEQ) 2016 Diana Cristina Silva de Azevedo 1 and Maurıcio Alves da Motta Sobrinho 2 1. Chair of COBEQ 2016, Universidade Federal do Ceara (UFC) 2. Member of the Scientic Committee of COBEQ 2016, Chair of COBEQ 2008, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) T he Brazilian Congress on Chemical Engineering (COBEQ) is a major scientic event in Brazil and Latin America, held under the auspices of the Brazilian Association of Chemical Engineering (ABEQ). It dates back to 1976, when a pioneering team from the University of S~ao Paulo (USP) decided to join scientists and practitioners from academia and industry working on Chemical Engineering and related elds. Since then, the event takes place every two years, shifting venues within the Northeast, South, and Southeast regions of the country. The Brazilian Meeting on Chemical Engineering Education (ENBEQ) has been part of COBEQ since 2012. It is an important national forum for the discussion of actions and recommendations intended to improve higher education in Chemical Engineering (ChE) in response to demands from industry and the global society. COBEQ has a long-standing tradition of bringing cutting-edge topics for discussion in ChE and related elds by welcoming distinguished scientists and educators from the global ChE community. Past editions of COBEQ have welcomed Scott Fogler (University of Michigan, USA), Alırio Rodrigues (University of Porto, Portugal), Jean Claude Charpentier (University of Lorraine, France), Massimo Morbidelli (ETH, Switzerland), and Philippe Tanguy (Polytéchnique Montreal, Canada), just to name a few. The number of attendees and communications has grown steadily along the years, reaching a maximum of 2500 participants in COBEQ 2014, held in Florianopolis. The 21st edition of the conference took place in Fortaleza from 25 to 29 September 2016. It was organized by the Chemical Engineering Department of the Federal University of Ceara (UFC) and welcomed around 1400 attendees. There were 17 plenary lectures, 22 keynote lectures, 3 short courses, and nearly 2000 technical contributions presented in oral and poster sessions. The conference provided an interesting kaleidoscope of the most recent advancements in 10 different track areas, namely: Environmental Engineering and Green Technologies; Separation Engineering and Thermodynamics; Materials Engineering and Thermodynamics; Chemical Reaction Engineering and Catalysis; Food Science and Engineering; Transport Phenomena and Particulate Systems; Biotechnology; Modelling, Simulation and Control; Energy, Petro- leum, Gas and Biofuels; and Chem. Eng. Education. For the rst time, ENBEQ was completely embedded in the conference program and two of the plenary lectures dealt with motivating topics in Chem. Eng. education: Teaching Chemical Product Design, by Edward Cussler (University of Minnesota, USA) and Entrepreneurship and Innovation, by Roger-Marc Nicoud (YPSO FACTO, France). This special section dedicated to COBEQ 2016 brings an interesting selection of 10 technical papers that were presented in the conference. [110] They were carefully pre-selected by conference ad hoc reviewers from the abstracts accepted for presentation at the conference. Then authors were invited to submit an extended version of their work to The Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. Although a selection of 10 papers out of 2000 abstracts may not seem representative, this special section gathers outstanding contributions within the frame of 7 out of the 10 track areas of the conference, coming from leading universities in Chemical Engineering in Brazil. They will denitely provide the reader with a avour of the science of Chemical Engineering currently under development in the country. REFERENCES [1] I. 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Rodrıguez-Castellon, Can. J. Chem. Eng. 2017, 95, 2315. [10] A. Badino, M. Esperanca, R. Bettega, Can. J. Chem. Eng. 2017, 95, 2324. Can. J. Chem. Eng. 95:2238, 2017 © 2017 Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering DOI 10.1002/cjce.23031 Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). 2238 THE CANADIAN JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING VOLUME 95, DECEMBER 2017