For Bruce Koel, this year’s wedding anniversary will have some definite chemistry.
Koel and his wife, Emily Carter, will both receive awards from the American Chemical Society on March 27, their 12th anniversary. Koel, a 1976 graduate of Emporia State University, found out about his award just three days after Carter found out about hers.
“I called her and said ‘Great news, Emily, you don’t have to pay for my plane ticket this year,’” said Koel (pronounced KALE). “I’m sure a husband and wife have received awards before, but I don’t think it’s ever happened at the same time.”
“There’s some kind of alignment of the stars, I suppose,” he added with a chuckle.
Both are physical chemists: she at Princeton, he at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Penn. According to Princeton University, Carter’s award recognizes her use of computer simulations to model complex chemical phenomena, which could ultimately lead to the ability to build new materials atom by atom that can outperform existing materials.
Koel’s award, the George A. Olah Award in hydrocarbon or petroleum chemistry, is for his work in what is called surface chemistry, a field that got its start around the 1960s. Essentially, surface chemistry studies the reactions on the first few atomic layers of a substance, rather than the substance as a whole.
Why is that important? For one thing, surface chemistry is essential in understanding and improving catalysts, materials which can provoke a chemical reaction. They’re handy materials at that — platinum, the object of Koel’s studies, has hundreds of uses as a catalyst such as refining oil into gasoline or low-octane gas into high octane.
But platinum is expensive and hard to come by. So Koel’s research has explored the use of platinum alloys, ways of adding different metals into the mix that can improve the catalyst’s performance. If scientists can understand why particular alloys work better, Koel said, they could eventually design a better catalyst.
“I’m trying to figure out why,” he said. “We’re nowhere near understanding every detail ... but the ACS wants to recognize what I’ve done to advance our understanding to where it is now.”
Koel grew up in Norton and originally had little interest in college beyond athletics. A teacher who had played football for Emporia State University talked him into going to ESU.
“It’s got a good track and cross country program and it’s a real university, a real college,” the teacher told him. “If you land here, you’ll be fine.”
As it happens, Koel never ran a step for the track team. He found himself interested in science early on, but was unsure what to enroll in. His adviser, Alfred Ericson, suggested an unusual approach. Sign up for pre-med, he told Koel — that way, you can take all the science classes and sort things out later.
“Al was a fantastic teacher but not such a great adviser,” Koel laughed. “I think I took 27 hours my freshman semester. I tested into a lot of stuff and he forgot to tell me to drop the other stuff. ... I was in the lab and class from 8 in the morning until 5 at the end of each day.”
At first, Koel thought he wanted to be a physics major. But at the end of his second semester, he found out he had won a chemistry award, but it could only be claimed if he was a chemistry major.
“So I said, ‘Fine, I’m a chemistry major,’” Koel said.
Koel has since been named an ESU Distinguished Alumni. While going to graduate school in Texas, he sometimes took some ribbing about coming up from a small school like Emporia — at least, until the results played out.
“I felt I was as prepared or better prepared than most of the people around me,” Koel said. “I never regretted going there.”