[5] Prior to his academic career, he published works related to bubbles and surface flows while he was employed by the Shell Development Company in Emeryville, California.
[6] Scriven made contributions in the fields of capillary hydrodynamics, bubble growth dynamics,[6] gradient theory, interfacial phenomena and the theory of bicontinuous structures, enhanced oil recovery, wetting transition, cryogenic electron microscopy, Galerkin weighted residuals in finite element methods, and coating process fundamentals.
He also shared some thoughts on the future of the field in an article: In brief, the practice of chemical engineering, like seasonal foliage, changes; like individuals, the subdisciplines grow, mature, and give birth to others; the discipline like a species evolves, but the essence, like a tree, is invariant.
For the better part of a century, the profession in the United States has broadened its base - now rejoining materials science - and built on it successfully to fulfill the needs of both the existing and the emerging chemical process technologies of each era.
As past high technologies have matured, and turned senescent or moribund, the profession has again and again moved on to new frontiers, rapidly enough to avoid any danger of extinction.