Chemical engineering
Born on 14 October 1926, Sargent was educated at Bedford School and at Imperial College London where he received a BSc and a PhD in chemical engineering. He worked for Air Liquide in Paris as a practising engineer until 1959 when he returned to the UK and subsequently joined Imperial College as a lecturer. He described those war years and post-war France in his address to the University of Edinburgh. His career advanced and he was made Courtaulds professor of Chemical engineering at Imperial College London between 1966 and 1992, Dean of the City and Guilds College from 1973 to 1976, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 1975 to 1988 and director of the Centre for Process Systems Engineering (which he founded) from its launch in August 1989 until his retirement in 1992, when he became a senior research fellow and emeritus professor in the centre and a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Engineering.