A number of universities have maintained a dedicated laboratory course as part of the process control sequence, but those numbers have been shrinking due to the high resource requirements of lab courses and the pressure to reduce the number of hours in the engineering curriculum. While some chemical engineering departments run a junior measurement lab and a senior unit-operations lab, many now operate only one lab in the senior year which may incorporate control-related experiments. Laboratory courses are evolving, and new directions are being examined at specific universities, combining elements of simulation and also distance learning. In the chemical process industries, the high cost of pilot scale equipment and operating personnel has led to greater reliance on computer-based simulations rather than traditional pilot-scale experiments. Consequently, today's engineers work more often from a control room or from behind a computer screen. Now, you rarely find engineers in the field adjusting valve positions, flow rates, and temperatures. Typically, this is done using the computer interfaces of distributed control systems. Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier, Inc. Dec 2005 A number of universities have maintained a dedicated laboratory course as part of the process control sequence, but those numbers have been shrinking due to the high resource requirements of lab courses and the pressure to reduce the number of hours in the engineering curriculum. While some chemical engineering departments run a junior measurement lab and a senior unit-operations lab, many now operate only one lab in the senior year which may incorporate control-related experiments. Laboratory courses are evolving, and new directions are being examined at specific universities, combining elements of simulation and also distance learning. In the chemical process industries, the high cost of pilot scale equipment and operating personnel has led to greater reliance...