MEDWAY
RIVER FIRE DEPARTMENTS
Queens County, Nova Scotia
Queens County, Nova Scotia
Dr. DAVID WULFMAN
Dr. David Wulfman is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and went to a technical high school. There he had training in the mechanical arts in addition to three years of chemistry, and a year of metallurgy, as well as the regular college prep courses. This preparation helped him obtain various positions at the University of Michigan where he became an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant at the age of 18. While holding that position, for four years he worked as a synthetic organic chemist, metallurgical research assistant, and surface chemistry research assistant. He also spent two summers working in the woods harvesting birch logs for veneer and lumber.
He was awarded an AM Degree by Dartmouth College while serving as a Teaching Fellow. He built an apparatus for analyzing and quantifying organic reaction products. At University of Wisconsin he was a research assistant running the low and high pressure hydrogenation laboratory. He moved to Stanford with his advisor and held a National Institutes of Health Graduate Fellowship, he re-established their hydrogenation laboratory, published two papers with his brother on the structure of a compound wrongly identified 10 years previously, and performed one of the first studies of chemical behaviour of ions using magnetic resonance techniques. His thesis work was directed toward the development of an improved synthesis of the steroid hormone, aldosterone.
After obtaining his PhD, he was appointed Senior Development Engineer with Hercules doing studies on the synthesis of explosives and rocket propellants. He built a laboratory for handling explosives and gases at
pressures up to 100,000 psi using remote handling technologies. In 1963 he moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at the then Missouri School of Mines where he taught both chemistry and chemical engineering courses. He served as departmental safety chair on and off for the next 30 years. During that period he taught fire management for laboratory assistants and emergency first aid. He also served on and chaired the School Library Committee, was member of the School Safety Committee, served as a member and also chair of the Arts and Science Curricula Committee, and as a member of the University Curricula Committee. He taught courses at the under graduate, intermediate and graduate level and developed a number of new
courses, including a course on Industrial Chemistry which was offered in both the Chemistry Department and the Department of Chemical Engineering.
During his tenure he directed theses of students in Chemical Engineering and in Chemistry. In 1991 he convinced the General Faculty of the need to train all students who would take laboratory classes and University
personnel who handled hazardous materials on their safe use and disposal. This led to him writing a manual on the subject which was published by Genium Publishing.
In the 1974-75 academic year he was appointed Checheure Associe de la Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris where his sole duty was to travel to various universities and research centers to lecture under the aegis of the French Chemical Society. At that time he was engaged in writing six papers on his and his students researches and two long review chapters covering the areas of their synthetic research. The following
year he was invited to contribute a chapter dealing exclusively with his research in the area of homogeneous
catalysis.
Beginning in 1972 he began collaborations with the Rock Mechanics and Explosive Research Center at the University. This led to his becoming involved in the demilitarization of explosives and rocket propellants. He holds a patent on the conversion of rocket propellants and military explosives into commercial explosives. The explosive operations facility was located in an experimental underground mine. He was certified to work in underground mines by the US Bureau of Mines.
He has served as a consultant to the Department of Chemistry at Stanford University, (hydrogenation) Technology Development Inc., where he worked on his patent, and to Huntsman Petrochemical Corporation where he performed a safety analysis of a process they contemplated licensing.
He retired from the University of Missouri at Rolla with the title of Professor of Chemistry emeritus with around 30 technical papers and proceedings. After retirement from the University he served as a consultant on explosive work. While at the University he helped present explosive safety courses at the University, at the Graduate Engineering School, Fort Leonard Wood, and the Naval Surface Warfare Center - Crane, Indiana.
Dr. David Wulfman reads history as a hobby. He joined the Mill Village And District Fire Department in 1984.