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Special Section on Continuous Bioprocessing and Welcome Professor Liu to the Editorial Board

When a student, many can recall learning about the chemostat originated by Jacques Monod, which he described in “Recherches sur la Croissance des Cultures Bacte riennes.” It was intriguing and easy to make a link between cell cultivation at a chosen dilution rate and the continuous stirred tank reactor of classical chemical engineering. One could learn more by reading the symposia held in Prague on continuous culture. There experimentation and theory were further developed and described. The implementation of the chemostat as a tool and continuous production notions, however, has largely resided in the minds and efforts of academics, population ecologists, and strain evolvers. Assuring tight product quality and the challenges of actually implementing a completely continuous process meant that aggregating discrete batch processes and managing their transient inventories is how biotechnology first got off the ground. Now as scale and competition increasingly shape the future of biotechnology in tandem with the basic engine of fundamental discovery, the interest in achieving continuous bioprocessing is growing. In November 2015, the 2 conference in the Integrated Continuous Biomanufacturing series of Engineering Conferences International was held in Berkeley CA. This meeting brought together academic and industrial workers to share the issues and progress associated with achieving truly continuous bioprocessing. With even a modest amount of rumination, one can foresee that the challenges of linking discrete and different time scale processes such as cell growth and product isolation are considerable. Thus, much work was shared and many aspects were covered at the conference. This issue contains a special section devoted to these important technological and logistical issues. Most of the papers are work that was presented at the conference. In the process of putting the collection together, some workers with notable experience in the field submitted papers that were highly relevant; hence, all agreed that the inclusion of these additional papers was unquestionably merited. The section has four components. To set the stage, readers are first referred to contributions such as