Ames National Laboratory Director Karl Mueller was featured in an article by Rebecca Traeger and published in Chemistry World.
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I grew up the second of four children in the rather small city of Tonawanda, New York, which is about halfway between Buffalo and Niagara Falls on the beautiful Niagara River.
We spent a lot of time running around outside, like many kids in the 1960s and 1970s, and played a lot of street hockey. I also explored tonnes down at the Niagara River – a lot of swimming. My family was big into fishing, so we spent a significant amount of time on the water.
We were free to do a lot of things, whatever piqued our interest, and there wasn’t a lot of pressure to study every night. We were very involved in high school musicals, band and chorus.
Dad was an analytical chemist, and he worked at a local chemical company. He had his associate’s degree – which is a two-year degree offered at community colleges and technical colleges – and never went further with his formal education. So, to have two boys that became PhD chemists I think was very exciting for him.
He used to take the four of us kids into the lab to show us his infrared spectrometer and his gas chromatograph. We thought it was all just like science fiction.
You can read the full article at this link.