Chemical Engineering education is vital to a broad range of materials technologies, innovations as plastic parts for automobiles, ceramic engine components, high-performance food packaging materials, and modern construction materials. To a large extent, the materials of the future will be made possible by advances in chemical engineering.

Many important areas of manufacturing depend on research by chemists and chemical engineers. Manufacture of petrochemicals, computer-aided chemical process design, and the process technology involved in the automated manufacture of plastic films and coatings. Information and communication technologies are based on materials and processing techniques that are often the products of chemical or chemical engineering research. Optical fibers, nanofabrication technologies, multilayer electronic packages, optical interconnection and optoelectronic devices, electronic displays, data storage and retrieval systems, and single-atom manipulation techniques help illustrate that point.