From Acid Rain to Biotech: Chief Scientist Mike Kuhlman's Impact at Battelle

Battelle’s Chief Scientist Mike Kuhlman personifies success at the world’s largest independent research organization—he started at the scientific entry level, leveraged his education to contribute to important projects of the day, then learned and grew not only with the company, but with the country. Kuhlman has had several careers all while wearing a Battelle badge.

Kuhlman’s legendary one-organization employment spans more than 45 years at Battelle, a career he started by using physics to study acidic water droplets that developed into wave after wave of problem solving. If there were a hall of fame for people who have kept America safe without their knowing it, Dr. Kuhlman’s candidacy would get a first-round unanimous vote.

A baseball loving son with German roots (read: Cincinnati), Kuhlman was the first of his family to attend college (at age 15). While an influential high school physics teacher opened Kuhlman’s eyes to the power of science, sports provided life lessons. Kuhlman’s father, a warrant officer in the Army, was the man in charge of players from the Cincinnati Reds when they served on weekend Army Reserve duty, so Kuhlman got a firsthand view of members of the Big Red Machine and Pete Rose’s ambidextrous table tennis prowess.

“Physics is the best key we have to understand the workings of the universe at every scale. It provides the basic rules for everything,” said Kuhlman. “Baseball was a way to relate. Being a catcher teaches a lot about leadership. You’re driving the machine while being part of the team.”

Young among his peers and unable to achieve baseball stardom in the collegiate ranks, Kuhlman quickly narrowed his focus on science at nearby Thomas More College, known for its physics department. Early on, he was selected for a National Science Foundation (NSF) internship program at the University of Wyoming that showed him what a future in academic research could be. Another NSF stint at the University of Missouri studying cloud physics and the adsorption of water on a gold surface solidified his scientific path.  

Now that he knew about the binding energy of water molecules when they become droplets, he pursued graduate degrees in environmental science, specializing in aerosol physics at the University of North Carolina, a nationally famous department set oddly in UNC’s school of Public Health. “That was a huge benefit for me,” Kuhlman said. “I took classes in epidemiology and other things that don’t have any obvious connection with aerosol physics and that was useful training later.” 

Like many polymaths, Kuhlman also mastered computer programming at the time as a necessity. He built a Fortran model to examine how sulfur dioxide transformed into sulfuric acid droplets in the atmosphere. Long story short, Kuhlman helped improve our understanding of acid rain.

In the process of that achievement, Kuhlman’s path crossed with famed Battelle Chief Scientist Carl Alexander. A Navy veteran, Alexander was a towering figure at Battelle who developed nuclear fuels and found the best ways to use and store them, among myriad other nationally recognized accomplishments. Alexander and Battelle had projects that called for Kuhlman’s specific physics expertise; Kuhlman needed time on Ohio State University’s mainframe computer to figure out a problem with his doctoral thesis on acid rain (the problem, he eventually learned, was based on a German-to-English data translation error and not his coding).  

In 1979, Alexander hired Kuhlman, who worked at Battelle in the day and on OSU’s mainframe at night. “Defending my PhD (in 1982) was a piece of cake compared to what I was doing at Battelle,” said Kuhlman.

That’s because Kuhlman’s Battelle team was modeling accident scenarios at nuclear power plants. The meltdown at Three Mile Island provided a real-world opportunity to flex the team’s research. The Battelle squad produced 100-page reports on accident modeling of core meltdowns about every six weeks and presented findings to industry and government stakeholders in Washington D.C. “I was learning that at Battelle, even if we got grilled by industry, we didn’t flinch,” he said. “We just presented the facts; we had no horse in the race.”

It was a pressure-packed way to start a career, and like Alexander before him, Kuhlman thought he’d do it for a short while before heading back to academia. Neither ever did so on a full-time basis, though they both served as faculty at Ohio State at points in their careers. “I concluded, well before the three years I thought I’d spend here, that I’d have more freedom and have more impact on people’s lives at Battelle,” Kuhlman said. “In academia, if you want to be the world’s foremost expert on a narrow topic, you can do that. But if you want to know an awful lot about multiple areas of technology, Battelle is the place to do that.”

Kuhlman believes Battelle’s success in part is because of its wide range of well-educated scientists and engineers specializing in technical topics who must necessarily interact with intelligent non-specialists. “We frequently work with people who are not experts in our field and need to translate,” he said.

He said he never needed to leave Battelle because new careers kept presenting themselves in-house. He went from principal research scientist to research leader, department manager and vice president in the next two decades, each time focused upon new research areas and topics built from his previous experience.

He managed Battelle’s Applied Biology and Aerosol Technology Product Line, which comprised a staff of 125 research professionals and technical support staff. This research group operates state-of-the-art aerosol research laboratories, and several aerobiology and microbiology laboratories in support of multiple federal programs. “One takes on leadership roles on sub tasks on larger jobs, then full projects that you lead, eventually leading collaborative teams to meet the needs of the client,” Kuhlman said.

It was during this time he learned how to lead projects toward meeting needs instead of wants to achieve missions. “Helping refine that important difference for clients is an important aspect of growth at Battelle,” he said.

Work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study particulate matter for ambient air quality standards. The job seemed pedestrian to him at the time but in doing it, he acquired a new and beneficial skill—carefully generating high-quality data and analyzing it. It led Kuhlman and team into research for protecting soldiers against chemical weapon attacks.

In the late 1980s, Battelle scientists devised a new and improved way to test gas masks and MOPP protective suits. Because of his understanding of the behavior of fine particles and the physical chemistry of how charcoal cannisters work, as well as the fluid dynamics of how air flows through those devices, Kuhlman and team developed a passive sampler that analyzed gas concentrations in the suit without artificially changing the internal atmosphere.

Kuhlman’s team already had developed chemical agent detectors for America’s Department of Defense, and the experimental designs that were certified by our own surety labs meant Battelle had the staff who could assess the next geopolitical challenge on the horizon: biological weapons and defenses.

When Desert Storm began, there was widespread suspicion that Saddam Hussein may have done the unthinkable and developed biological weapons. Battelle’s team and Kuhlman built on its experience to ascertain much about the viability of biological weapons. “That’s the work we’ve been doing since 1990, assessing the reality of a threat,” Kuhlman said. “We’ve always had a reputation for delivering truth. Producing accurate, unbiased reporting for the government—that is a hard thing to find.”

If there’s a positive to the field of biological weapons threats, it’s that they’ve helped the world recognize that natural threats require a response that is not that different to ones from a man-made threat. “Biological threats aren’t much different from a pandemic in terms of what is required for mitigation strategy to minimize the impact,” Kuhlman said.

Soon, Kuhlman found a new branch on his career tree. The NSF had begun plans and construction of a continental-scale observatory that would collect similar data all around the United States. “It was a well-thought-out design for a national observatory but perhaps suffering from a lack of execution by the performer,” Kuhlman said.

Battelle was selected by the NSF to rescue the program and jumped in and corrected the schedule delays and cost overruns at the National Ecological Observatory Network. “At the time, I said, ‘What is NEON, other than a noble gas?” Kuhlman joked. “So, I checked it out and learned it fit so well with Battelle’s DNA. We are not responsible for the research. Our charter is to enable others to do research with the high-quality data we provide to the community. It fits us so well.”

Because Battelle manages and operates national laboratories for the United States Department of Energy, its expertise in large research infrastructure dates to the mid-1960s. Kuhlman was perfectly suited to take on this new task and ensure that NEON’s data would be an open resource for all researchers. “We continue to improve the protocols to provide the best quality data under a wide variety of settings,” he said. “It’s a challenge to maintain continuity and take into account the ecosystems in which we work. It’s a great accomplishment by our team.”

Now that the 30-year observatory is up and running, Kuhlman has focused on additional projects in the Arctic. Battelle’s Arctic Research Operations team enables researchers in various scientific fields to perform their work funded by the NSF. “Getting them to the research sites safely with the comms and data handling they need and enabling them to get to Summit Station, for example, and beyond and getting them back home safely is a large part of what we do. Someone has to do that. It’s inefficient for each research institution to figure it out on their own.”

Kuhlman did not have management and operations of research facilities on his career Bingo card. Neither were many of the extraordinary achievements he’s been responsible for during his career. There will be more. That’s because he is highly optimistic of Battelle’s positioning by its leadership. “Our leadership has brought an appreciation for the necessary financial underpinnings, and they understood our position and made changes to ensure that Battelle continues to contribute to positive societal impact for the next 100 years.”