Collection OM/480 - Costandi Audeh papers

Costandi (known as Costi) Audeh was born in 1932 in Nazareth, Palestine and educated at the Missionary Societies' Bishop Gobat School in Jerusalem. In 1948, he, like his father and brother before him, enrolled as a medical student at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. However, it soon became apparent that his true interest was not medicine but chemistry, and after passing the required entrance examination, he was accepted onto the four-year BSc course in Applied Chemistry at the University of Glasgow in 1951. Under an affiliation scheme between the University and the Royal Technical College (RTC), now the University of Strathclyde, students aiming for a degree in pure science or engineering could choose to take many of their required classes at the RTC. Costi did so, attending the RTC as a matriculated University student and graduating in 1955. He also took additional classes at the RTC in order to qualify for its Associateship (ARTC) in Applied Chemistry that same year. He went on to work for the British Rubber Producers' Research Association in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, but after a few years he returned to the Middle East, attracted by the prospect of a career in the oil industry. In 1958 he became a Refinery Chemist with the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), where he found another eight alumni of the University of Glasgow and the RTC amongst the employees, and where he developed expertise in the evaluation of crude oil. In 1962, Costi married Margaret Clark, a school teacher from Hull , who was also employed by KOC. Costi was subsequently transferred from KOC to Gulf Oil Corporation’s Gulf Research and Development Corporation (GRDC), and the Audehs departed for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America, where Costi was responsible for producing a handbook about all aspects of Kuwait Crude Oil and its derivative products. In 1966, he secured educational leave of absence to allow himself, Margaret and their two young sons to return to the United Kingdom, where he had been accepted onto the D.Phil. research programme in Physical Organic Chemistry at the University of York. Costi graduated in October 1970, and in 1971 took up a position in the Technology Department of the Mobil Research and Development Corporation (MRDC). There he developed generalised algorithms to predict the properties of various commercially obtained refinery products based on the properties of small distillate fractions obtained from crude oil by distillation in the laboratory. The algorithms were then converted to computer programs, known as ‘ASA Programs’. In 1974 he transferred from the Technology Department to the Central Research Division, later renamed the Central Research Laboratory (CRL) of MRDC, where he studied the chemistry and oxidative stability of petroleum based lubricating oil. Within the CRL, collaboration and the exchange of idea between researchers and staff from different departments was both facilitated and encouraged, and Costi benefitted from this, collaborating with various staff members from different areas of the MRDC to produce proposed solutions. Mobil saw sufficient potential in these proposed solutions to make them the subjects of numerous national and international patent applications, lodged before Costi's retirement from the corporation in 1993.