Bill Tumas

Is There a Low or Zero Emission Vehicle in Your Future?
 

I grew up in small towns in Pennsylvania and upstate New York with three brothers. As a youth, I was much more interested in sports than schoolwork. My elementary school years were focused mainly on baseball, football, and basketball. I was not that bad, but certainly was not a star. Later, I became very interested in ski racing and then hot dog skiing, which is what teenage skiers did before snowboarding was invented! We lived near a ski hill where we could ski every weekday from 4-10 pm and every weekend from 10am to 10pm. Early in high school student, I thought I wanted to be an engineer because I liked math and science much better than my English and French classes. I was not really sure what engineers did, although I knew they did more than just drive locomotives.
 
I was fortunate to have the opportunity after my high school junior year to spend a summer at Ithaca College doing chemistry laboratory work. In addition to having fun living with a bunch of college kids in an apartment on campus, I got to work in a laboratory along with a number of talented undergraduate students who taught me a lot of chemistry. Despite breaking more than my fair share of glassware and one day having to quickly remove a pair of jeans that were rapidly dissolving because I spilled the entire contents of a large bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid on them, I decided that I wanted to be a chemist. I liked the concept of making new molecules and materials and trying to understand how they behave and what you could do with them.
 
In the Spring of my senior year in high school, I chose to go to Ithaca College rather than MIT or Caltech because of the research experiences I saw undergraduates enjoying at Ithaca. The fact that there were a lot of girls on campus and the students seemed to know how to have fun when they were not studying might have played more than a small role in my decision as well. As an undergraduate, I carried out chemistry research for eight semesters and four summers, including several weeks in Montpelier, France, a month at Northwestern University, and a semester as well in The Netherlands at Leiden University. I also had the opportunity to give a number of presentations on my undergraduate research at national and international conferences.
 
Although I had the pleasure of traveling a number of times to Europe as an undergraduate, I still had not been west of the Mississippi River and was determined to go to graduate school in California. I still remember the day I learned before my freshman year at Ithaca that you actually got paid to go to graduate school in chemistry and do not have to pay any tuition! As an undergraduate, I had developed an interest in the effects of solvents on chemical reactions and pathways. I decided I wanted to study organic molecules without any solvents in graduate school and became enamored with the work at Stanford University on gas phase ions. So, in 1980, I drove my Datsun B210 loaded with everything I owned (there was still plenty of room left in it!) to start graduate school at Stanford. In addition to watching John Elway play college football for three years, I carried out my thesis research investigating the fundamentals of organic gas phase ions using lasers. I became very interested in how transition metals catalyze chemical reactions, and went on to Caltech in 1985 to do postdoctoral work with Bob Grubbs who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006.
 
While at Caltech, I decided at the last minute that I did not want to be a professor and turned down several academic job offers to take a position at DuPont Central Research in Wilmington, Delaware. At DuPont, I carried out some exploratory research, but then became very interested in the environmental aspects of chemistry and chemical manufacturing. I was appointed as the Central Research representative on the Corporate Environmental Technology Panel, and carried out research to help DuPont determine how to best treat chemical wastes. I enjoyed sailing the Chesapeake Bay and then was delighted when my two daughters were born, but missed the mountains on a regular basis. I recall the day I asked my two-year old daughter what she wanted to do on a Saturday in Delaware. She responded, “go to the mall,” and I said to myself that “we are out of here” and started planning on how to move to the mountains and still do science.
 
I came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1993 and started research on developing more environmentally benign methods to make chemicals. I had learned at DuPont that it was better to not make hazardous waste in the first place than to try to economically get rid of it. My postdocs, students and I focused on using compressed carbon dioxide in its supercritical state as a solvent for chemical reactions catalyzed by metal complexes, which allowed me to combine the expertise I gathered at Stanford, Caltech, and DuPont. In 1994, I became a group leader in the Chemistry Division and continued to carry out research. In the late 1990s, several colleagues and I helped start the Green Chemistry Institute which later became part of the American Chemical Society.
 
About 2003, I became very interested in energy applications, and soon after worked with a number of my colleagues to develop a Center of Excellence in Hydrogen Storage through a DOE competition. In 2006, I became a Program Director and am now responsible for Applied Energy Programs at Los Alamos, which span renewable energy, infrastructure, and fossil energy, including the hydrogen and fuel cell programs at Los Alamos.
 
I am delighted to have the opportunity to try to help us tackle the serious challenges in energy facing our society and planet.