Duncan Schleiss: DeltaV pioneer elected to Process Automation Hall of Fame

It can be a little intimidating to find yourself among people you’ve long admired, but it also makes the honor much more meaningful. Such is the case for Duncan Schleiss, longtime VP of business development at Emerson, who now adds a new title to his legacy—2025 Process Automation Hall of Fame inductee. Schleiss, who many in the industry recognize for his work as part of the development teams of some notable technologies, particularly DeltaV, admits being mentioned with some of the people he’s respected, and in some cases considers his heroes, is “nothing short of incredible.”

“I have so much respect for so many of the names [in the hall of fame],” Schleiss says. “They’re all legends in my mind.”

Schleiss now joins a peer group that not only worked with him throughout his career, but also nominated and selected him to join them in the hall of fame. He mentions members like Terry Blevins, Dave Emerson, John Berra and Greg McMillan as people who helped shape his career. 

It’s no surprise that Schleiss quickly points out the work and influence of others while talking about his own induction. He considers his success the result of the great teams of colleagues and mentors he’s had. “I walk in big shoes, and I feel really humbled to be in the presence of great people in our industry,” he says. 

One of those heroes is his father, a chemistry major as an undergraduate in their native South Africa. Schleiss combined his father’s chemistry influence with his own math acumen into a chemical engineering degree from the University of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal) in Durban, before heading the U.S. to complete his master’s degree at Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge. “LSU and Natal U were sister schools linked by the sugar industry,” he explains. 

At LSU, Schleiss loved educating others, and became an assistant professor at LSU, fulfilling his career goal of becoming a teacher. “I always felt I wanted to be in the education business,” he admits. “Well, I still feel like I’m in the education business when it comes to the world of automation. After 40 years in business, you tend to know what you’re talking about.“

And he’s all too willing to pass along his knowledge to the next generation of engineers.

Building a career

These days, Schleiss has lived in the U.S. longer than he did in South Africa, but he still maintains plenty of family and work connections with his homeland. “In a strange way, it’s still my home,” he says. 

Home in the U.S. is Round Rock, Texas, just outside of Austin, where he’s worked for Emerson for the last 32 years. It’s also where he’s made more than his fair share of the accomplishments that led to his selection to the Process Automation Hall of Fame. For example, he currently holds 54 patents for technologies that many of us use in our work today. “I’m very proud of those,” he says. 

After graduating from LSU, he worked for EMC Controls (now Valmet), which acquired NovaTech Automation that created the D3 distributed control system (DCS) in 1982. D3 introduced the concept of unit relative operations to the process control industry, dividing processes into functional units for better control. He remembers trying to keep up with the work as a new employee. “I felt we were changing things on the fly which was pretty scary,” he remembers.

Schleiss soon left for a job at Combustion Engineering, which had just merged with Taylor to become one of the largest process instrumentation companies in the U.S. Combustion Engineering was acquired by ABB in 1989,where he became intimate with Taylor’s MOD300 system that added to his vision of the perfect DCS.

He later joined Fisher Controls, which was acquired from Monsanto by Emerson in 1992. He’s thankful that he ended up with the company and never left, like a lot of his colleagues. “It’s a good place to work and people tend to stick,” he says.