This topical is timely because water is increasingly viewed as a limiting resource in many situations. For example, according to Andrew Liveris, CEO of Dow Chemical: “Water is today’s issue. It is the oil of this century, not a question.” Additionally, Ban Ki Moon, U.N. Secretary-General, has stated: “Too often, where we need water we find guns instead. Population growth will make the problem worse. So will climate change. As the global economy grows, so will its thirst.” Water and energy needs are inherently coupled – to produce clean water requires energy, and to produce energy requires, in some cases massive amounts of clean water. Because of the inherently multidisciplinary nature of Chemical Engineering, it is uniquely situated among the science and engineering disciplines to make extraordinary contributions toward the resolution of this global challenge. A Topical conference bringing together chemical engineers (and others) specialized in low energy separations, catalysis, water chemistry, surface science (as it relates, for example, to fouling and biofouling of membranes), and related areas will help keep chemical engineers (and AIChE) at the forefront of this field and provide synergistic, crossdisciplinary networking opportunities to stimulate new concepts to use in attacking this critical problem of the 21st Century. Overall Program Chairs for the Topical are: D. Bhattacharyya (DB), University of Kentucky, USA, email: db@engr.uky.edu; Benny Freeman, University of Texas, USA, email:freeman@che.utexas.edu; Neal Chung, NUS, Singapore, email:chencts@nus.edu.sg