My Background
Being a Zone 7 Director requires a broad range of technical, financial, and listening skills and the wisdom to apply them well. The following autobiography demonstrates those important qualifications. The decisions made have a profound impact of people's lives. I've also been involved in many activities that address that dimension of the job.
My wife and I met as undergraduates at Iowa State University in chemistry lab. To help fund college expenses, I worked part time characterizing water contamination. Our group developed new methods using equipment very primitive by today's standards. We ultimately discovered aromatic hydrocarbons leached from an old coal-gas plant used before natural gas was prevalent. This job taught me that value of working on practical problems that affect people's lives and that the answers to technical problems are not always what is presumed.
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We moved to Livermore in 1977 after I received a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to work at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. It was the time of the OPEC oil embargo and gas lines. I came to work on oil shale--something completely different from my previous experience that would increase the supply of liquid fuels. That resource is now past its time given what we now know about climate change, but it taught me that the in-vogue solutions of today are not always what will be the best solution decades down the road.
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I spent 10 years on laser fusion (ICF) leading groups developing technology for targets, material qualification, the design of the target-chamber first wall found in many LLNL stories, growth of large crystals for frequency conversion, and mitigation of laser damage spots. All these fed directly into the first demonstration in 2022 of fusion ignition in a laboratory setting. This experience taught me tools for managing large projects and that what is possible can advance profoundly with advances in the underlying technologies.
After 9/11, I turned my attention to a wide range of national security projects, including detection of chemical weapons, nonproliferation, water-system security, and aging and safety of various types of weapons. I completed that work in 2025, although I had a decade-long absence working for a start-up company and at Stanford University on energy-related projects. I am currently the Chief Science Officer for DeepGreen Solutions, which is exploring ocean-based capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide.
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During my career, I've published about 300 journal articles, conference proceedings, and technical reports along with 12 patents and 2 books. These documents have been cited more than 25,000 times in the scientific literature. I've been a member of a dozen scientific societies and served on the editorial board of two scientific journals.
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While I've been active in Asbury UMC for 46 years in music and administrative and social-support committees, I became active about 10 years ago in more diverse local activities. I Joined the Rotary Club of Livermore, which provides mini-grants to many classrooms, students, and nonprofit organizations. I co-founded Partners for Change Tri-Valley, which teaches life skills to those near the margins of homelessness, and I founded Quest Science Center to educate all about how science affects our daily lives and to give students hands-on experiments on principles and practices of science.
Water Percolation and porosity experiment at the 2019 Tri-Valley Innovation Fair
Quest Science Center has reached tens of thousands through Science@Stockmen's Park in Livermore and the Innovation Fair at the Pleasanton fairgrounds. I personally designed and constructed popular activities teaching how sediment porosity and particle size affect the rate of groundwater flow and how water velocity separates particles of different sizes and densities, which is important for understanding how our aquifers are formed and how panning for gold works. I'm currently working with high-school students on monitoring natural and human sources of methane in the Tri-Valley. Forming Quest also got me involved in Innovation Tri-Valley, the Livermore Valley Chamber of Commerce, and the Tri-Valley Conservancy.
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I've served on Livermore's General Plan Advisory Committee, which introduced me to long-range planning for local government agencies. In 2021, my wife and I purchased a building in downtown Livermore to provide low-cost space to nonprofit organizations, and it houses Tri-Valley Haven's food pantry and CommonPoint Nonprofit Center. Running this small business has taught me a lot about the issues facing Tri-Valley businesses. We also commissioned a murals honoring the five astronauts who worked at LLNL and Sandia CA and the Western Pacific train station (which was partially on our current property) as part of our mission for downtown beautification, inspirational science, and historical education.
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(Photo credit Ron Essex Photography/LVCC)
