Michael Buric

Zierler:

This is David Zierler, oral historian for the American Institute of Physics. It is December 8th, 2020. I am so happy to be here with Dr. Michael Buric. Michael, it’s good to meet you. Thank you so much for joining me.

Buric:

Hi, David! Good to be with you.

Zierler:

To start, would you please tell me your title and institutional affiliation?

Buric:

Let’s see. I would be a staff scientist. I've been a staff scientist for the last ten years or so at the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).

Zierler:

And in this position, you're a federal employee of NETL?

Buric:

Right, yeah. I work directly for the federal government at NETL.

Zierler:

And what does the title “staff scientist- “what might that suggest in terms of your management responsibilities, who reports to you, who you report to?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, it basically means that I'm a permanent fixture at the lab, and I'm engaged in a number of research projects across different DOE—field work proposals, is what we call them. Essentially different pieces of work in different areas of interest. I have a number of contractors that work with me. So, we can contract scientists, mostly at Leidos Research Support Team, and we also have a number of postdoctoral students that work in my group, that we contract through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science Education. And some students, as well. So basically, a staff scientist is a person who oversees a number of different research projects in different areas.

Zierler:

In what ways has COVID and remote work put certain projects on hold, and what are you able to do from home, and what do you have to go into the laboratory for?

Buric:

So COVID has slowed things down a little bit, but we are still certainly getting a lot of work done right now. Basically, as you know, in science, there’s a lot of literature research. There’s a lot of reading to do, reading papers and keeping up with the latest on what your colleagues are doing, and such. And we do a lot of publication ourselves, as well. So that whole portion of the job is really pretty reasonable to do from home. From here, I have access to a number of library systems, and digital libraries, that we can use to access all of this vast amount of information, now easily available on the internet. So, that portion of my job is fairly easy to do at home. We can search the literature. We can talk with our colleagues. We can write papers and get things published. The portion that has been a little bit more difficult is the actual lab work, as you would guess. So, we're basically working on a kind of social distancing schedule, whereby we limit the number of people that would be in a lab at the same time, and we try to ensure that the people that are there can maintain social distancing. And then we require, of course, that everyone that’s in a lab wear a mask all the time, and various other precautions. There’s more cleaning of the labs that goes on now, for instance. But that slowed things down a bit, because we can’t have a large number of people in the lab at the same time doing individual experiments and things. We just have to keep people a bit more separate. So, it has definitely slowed down the work. Hasn’t really brought anything to a halt completely. We still do have researchers in our group in several days a week, where possible. For some of them, it’s more like one day a week or two days a week, like myself. But we do have people in the lab on a continuous basis, and they are still plugging along doing important experiments, keeping that really important work going.

Zierler:

Have computers and automated data analysis helped sort of supercharge your ability to do laboratory work remotely?

Buric:

To some extent. So, I will say that we do use machine learning and artificial intelligence quite a bit in our work. That’s a big part of modern data analysis. And we have been able to do some of that work from home. We do have access to, for instance, the Joule supercomputer at NETL. We can access Joule remotely and do large pieces of simulation or data analysis on that computer right from home, without skipping a beat. So, the capabilities in computing in the last ten years or so have really enabled what’s going on now. If this pandemic had hit ten or fifteen years ago, and we were doing the same thing, I don’t know where we’d be. We’d probably not be getting anywhere near as much work done. You and I wouldn't be able to sit here and talk on Zoom with no delay, or no huge delay, and no big problems, thankfully.

Zierler:

Right (laughter). Michael, let’s take it all the way back to the beginning. Let’s start with your parents. Tell me a little bit about them and where they're from.

Buric:

Oh, sure. Let’s see. My parents are from Pittsburgh. They were Pittsburghers, born and raised. To give you a little further background, my grandfather worked as a machinist on the North Side. And at that time, in the- oh, I guess this would have been thirties and forties, largely- machinists were one of the more respected people in society. They were very important people. They had a huge house that always looked like a mansion to me, but it, well, seems a little smaller now (laughter). And my other grandfather worked in the stockyards, also on the North Side. So, he was the guy who literally unloaded trains coming in and out of Pittsburgh, filled with barnyard animals. He would take care of the animals, and feed them, and water them, and get them on the next train going to wherever they were going, the next day. So, completely different sort of people in different sectors of society. They produced, of course, my parents, who met and fell in love a very, very long time ago. My father was an electronics technician, and my mom was an administrative assistant. My father had passed away in the nineties, so also quite a long time ago. And from our early adolescent years on, we were- my brother and I were raised by my mom entirely, of course with lots of help from the family. So being in a single-parent household for so long really meant that I had to learn to do a lot of things. So, along the course of the way, living that kind of lifestyle, you learn to fix a lot of things for yourself. You learn to cook at a very young age. You sort of get an early education in life, I think (laughter). So that’s where we came from. We grew up in Shaler Township, just north of Pittsburgh. I went to Shaler High School and eventually went to University of Pittsburgh for electrical engineering. And I stayed at Pitt for a very, very long time, probably about ten years, from starting my undergraduate to finishing my PhD.

Zierler:

Wow.

Buric:

I really loved the people at Pitt and the program there. University of Pittsburgh has a great engineering school. I consider it to be one of the best in the country. And there are still people at Pitt that I do collaborative research with. We have a number of projects with people at different universities across the country, but Pitt is really one of my favorite places to collaborate.

Zierler:

Michael, you said you have Croatian heritage. Is that on both sides of the family? Your mom and your dad’s families?

Buric:

Both sides of the family. Strangely enough, my great grandparents lived in the same village in Croatia, and my grandparents came here totally independently, and my parents- the two families never really knew or talked to each other, but they came from exactly the same place. And I believe my parents met at a church bazaar that was run by the Croatian Roman Catholic church in the neighborhood. So yeah, strangely enough, my parents were able to get that whole relationship back together that was in very close proximity with their grandparents a couple of generations earlier.

Zierler:

Was it a large Croatian community where you grew up?

Buric:

Oh, sure. There was the Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic Church on the North Side, as I mentioned earlier, where my parents both attended when they were growing up. And there was the Croatian Fraternal Union. It’s an organization my mother is still involved with, quite a bit. She does a lot of work with them, actually doing some historical work. Maybe you'd be interested in this. She has worked quite a bit in cataloging some of the unknown people in the Saint Nicholas Roman Catholic cemetery in Ross township. So, there were hundreds and hundreds of people buried there, before they really had a good system of keeping records. So, she has done a lot of finding out who those people were and mapping out where they're located and creating a plaque to memorialize all the unknown people that were buried in that cemetery. So, kind of fleshing out a little bit more of our cultural history has been her job for a little while.

Zierler:

Michael, two or three generations in, I'm curious if there were any Croatian cultural activities or traditions that were a part of your childhood.

Buric:

Oh, sure, definitely. My first go-to is always the food. So, I'm a big fan of lots of different cuisines from all around the world, but those few dishes that your parents and your grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles would produce that were really authentic were always some of my favorites. So, definitely the food. I've also been to quite a few Tamburitzans shows. I never decided to play a traditional Croatian stringed instrument, but I do play a number of modern stringed instruments that sort of are modern descendants of those (laughter).

Zierler:

Michael, when did you start to get interested in science?

Buric:

That’s a great question! I would say at a very young age. So, I was a kid who was always building stuff in the garage. Occasionally lighting it on fire; we won’t talk about that in this interview (laughter). I built my first Tesla coil when I was, oh, about ten or eleven years old, something like that. And from a very young age, I became interested in electricity and interested in lasers. And lasers and optics is now a big part of the job that I do. So, from a very young age, I enjoyed playing with all these cool science toys and things. I was a kid with a chemistry set. The chemicals in that chemistry set only lasted a couple of weeks, because we went through all the experiments in the book, and some other things. There are probably still stains on the dining room table from that.

Zierler:

And you went to public schools throughout?

Buric:

Yeah, yeah, sure. I went to Shaler Area High School. Did pretty well there. I graduated I want to say third or so in my class of 450 at Shaler. But there were really some good programs there, in public school at the time. I ended up taking a bunch of advanced placement classes. I think I had probably more than half of my freshman year in college knocked out before I left high school. And those opportunities really helped push things along in college, and both made it a lot easier and a lot more fun to do.

Zierler:

And when you were thinking about college, you were specifically thinking about majoring in science?

Buric:

Yeah, I think I got the idea in my head at one point that I wanted to know everything about how electricity worked. Because as a little kid, you really see electricity- the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote says, “Any technology significantly developed is indistinguishable from magic.” Well, electricity was magic to me. And the only place you could really go and figure it all out was in a good electrical engineering program. So that’s what I did.

Zierler:

And I assume for you, Pitt was an easy decision because it was close by and an excellent school.

Buric:

(Laughter) It was an easy decision for those reasons, but also because they offered a reasonable scholarship. And I was in no position at the time- again, being from a single-parent family, to go and pay some exorbitant amount to go to an Ivy League school or something like that. I was also accepted at a number of other places, but Pitt really made the deal sweet enough to make me want to go.

Zierler:

What did you end up majoring in, at Pitt?

Buric:

Oh, so it was electrical engineering as soon as I could declare it. I did grad school in the electrical engineering department there as well.

Zierler:

As an undergraduate, what professors did you get close with, or who served as a mentor to you?

Buric:

Well, I would say that there were a couple of guys at Pitt. I’d probably want to talk more about my experiences in grad school, because that’s the place where you really do get a lot closer with a mentor. For your master’s thesis and for your PhD dissertation, you have a mentor you work very closely with. And during my master’s thesis, that was Dr. Kevin Chen in electrical engineering. Dr. Chen is an excellent mentor. I think I first encountered him when I took quantum mechanics. And quantum mechanics, as you know, is sort of the oddball stepsister in physics. It’s completely different than all the other physics you'll take. And I actually did really poorly in that class (laughter). I think I got like a C or something like that. It was probably just a kind gesture that I didn't fail that class completely. But it really gets you thinking about some of these deeper concepts in physics, and maybe how the world really works, on a subatomic level. And there’s all this new material being thrown at you, and of course you've got all your own ideas about why this material may be right or wrong. But I was glad to have Dr. Chen sort of guiding me through that, although I did, I think, more poorly than just about any other subject I've ever taken. Later, that did not deter Kevin from taking me on as a grad student, and I completed my entire master’s thesis with Dr. Chen, largely doing laser sensing applications. So, we did some really cool sensors for NASA and for some other grants that we were working on at the time. And I made it through my master’s thesis, with honors, with Dr. Chen. Later, during my PhD dissertation, I got hooked up with Dr. Joel Falk, who is now emeritus at Pitt, and he’s off living in San Francisco, living the dream as a professor emeritus. And basically Dr. Falk, who was also an excellent, excellent mentor—he had been in the department for a very, very long time, and he was the head of that department for a short period of time. In his later years in the department, was focusing just on a couple of development applications, a couple of really important grants that he had. One of those grants was from the National Energy Technology Laboratory to develop gas Raman sensors. We will get into that at some point, but they're gas sensors that operate very, very quickly to analyze a mixture of gases. Could be natural gas, could be some chemical process gas or something, somewhere. Sounded like a really interesting application to me. Sounded like a neat place where I could play with some lasers and hang out and spend my time doing research. But I was luckily able to join up as a PhD student with Dr. Falk, and I worked on that grant until the end of my PhD, and a couple of months afterwards, while I was looking for a job. And that sort of connection I think helped me to get my current position at NETL as a staff scientist. So, I have to thank Dr. Falk in part for that, and thank Dr. Chen, as a big part of that whole experience. They were both excellent guys to work with.

Zierler:

I asked about undergraduate mentors because I was wondering if one of the reasons why you decided to stay at Pitt was because you already knew the professors that you wanted to work with as a graduate student.

Buric:

Oh, sure (laughter). Right about that period of time, when I was graduating from Pitt, I did graduate at the top of my electrical engineering class at Pitt (laughter). Right about that time, you start to get these feelers put out from the guys doing research in various departments at Pitt, and they really made a good case for, “Buric, you should stick around for another four to six years, and see how this works out.” Thankfully, I listened to those guys and stuck around.

Zierler:

So, you didn't think at all about going anywhere else for graduate school?

Buric:

You know, I was recruited at a couple of other locations, but I think the guys at Pitt really made a good case for the work that they were engaged in, and why it was important, and why I should be a part of it. And things went very well from there.

Zierler:

In physics, of course, there’s a classic distinction between theory and experimentation. I'm curious, in electrical engineering, what level that there’s a binary for that discipline as well?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, everything starts in theory. Even in electrical engineering, it’s really no different. Hmm. So, we work with a lot of the basic physics involved in the sensors field. So, I don’t know if I got to mention, but largely I work in sensors and controls. And in particular, I do a lot of work with optical sensors. Well, the physics of optics is I want to say a relatively new field in the world of physics in general. We've been doing this for hundreds and hundreds of years, and optics is sort of one of the last things that we came to understand. So, when we're looking to produce some kind of a new sensor that does something that no other sensor does in the world today, we're trying to push sort of the boundaries of optical science, to try to figure out how to make better devices. So, most of what you build comes from some theory of how stuff should work in optics, and then the hard part is translating that how it should work in theory into a device that actually does what it’s supposed to do.

Zierler:

How closely was your dissertation research related to what Professor Chen was doing?

Buric:

Oh, it was actually sort of right up the same alley. So, in my master’s thesis with Dr. Chen, I was looking at a gas sensor application. We were actually looking at sensing hydrogen for- well, at the time, they were running the space shuttle on a regular basis at NASA, and the space shuttle was fueled with hydrogen and oxygen. They had miles and miles of piping that was all at very, very low temperature. So cryogenic temperature hydrogen piping, to deliver this liquid hydrogen into the ginormous tanks that you see fly up into the air when the space shuttle goes up. So, we had this grand challenge of trying to produce a sensor that would detect leaks of hydrogen gas right next to a pipe that was sitting there at a cryogenic temperature. So, all the other sensors that you could access at the time, that you could purchase or obtain at the time, would work at much higher temperatures. So, you were talking about things that maybe would work at room temperature or maybe a little bit below. And we had to create devices that would work in very, very cold, and reliably. Because, you know, if there’s a leak of hydrogen, there’s about to be a giant explosion somewhere. So, we were looking at gas sensor applications. We actually constructed an optical fiber sensor for that project, that you would string along the pipes and would essentially tell you where the hydrogen leak was located. So, there was a little bit of lasers involved. There was a little bit of fiber optics. And there was a little bit of novel materials science involved, to actually produce these sensors on fibers. That sort of experience put me in a perfect place to start the project with Dr. Falk and NETL. Dr. Chen also helped out on that project as well, although he wasn’t the principal investigator for that one. The project with NETL was looking at analyzing gases very, very quickly using Raman spectroscopy. So again, it was something that involved lasers. There was a little bit of novel material. And there was eventually a little bit of fiber optics in the project. So, it turned out to be right up my alley.

Zierler:

So, between your access to facilities at NETL and Pitt, you really had access to some of the best instrumentation out there.

Buric:

Oh, sure. And what I really became through that whole process of developing a fast Raman gas analyzer, was I became an instrument builder. Really, I learned a lot of the skills necessary to build world-class scientific instruments that are really I want to say space age. They involve some of the most complicated components. You're constantly sourcing weird stuff from all over the world, be it lasers or optoelectronic components, or electronics, et cetera, and you're putting them together by the seat of your pants using what you know about physics and engineering. So, I really became an instrument builder in that process.

Zierler:

Another divide, Michael, in graduate school, as you're developing your identity as a scholar, is if your interests are more in sort of the basic science, just figuring out how stuff works, or how much you're interested in applications, and really trying to solve real-world problems. Both intellectually and academically, where did you see yourself on that divide as you were developing your skills as a graduate student?

Buric:

Well, so I mentioned I came from a line of machinists and stockyard workers, right?

Zierler:

[laugh] Yeah.

Buric:

(Laughter) My approach has always been that ultimately, the great utility that people get out of science is from the applications that we bring to them. People in general benefit from the wonderful things that technology has derived from science. So, I always saw myself as being more on the applied engineering end of things. Even though I'm a scientist now, I've always viewed myself as an engineer and a nuts-and-bolts guy who likes to build stuff that’s useful. If you were to look around my basement right now, you'd see the machine shop that exists there at the moment, which has lathes and mills and planers and other woodworking tools and electronics benches. Basically, everything you need to build cool stuff. So that’s where I see myself in science. It’s necessary to understand all the theory that goes into what you're doing, and to gain sort of an intimate relationship with what these classical physics guys were talking about, what they were trying to get across to us, and use that information to build stuff that’s really useful.

Zierler:

What did you see as the principal contributions of your dissertation, and how did that relate to the broader field?

Buric:

Well, in my dissertation, we uncovered a really interesting technique of using optical waveguides to enhance optical signals that are really tiny. So often, you run into this thing in optics where there’s some phenomenon you'd like to measure, but that phenomenon doesn't necessarily occur a lot, and when it does occur, it’s really non-obvious. It’s really unobtrusive that something is really happening. Raman scattering, invented by C.V. Raman in about 1920-something, is one of those type of phenomena. You shoot a laser at a bunch of stuff, the stuff scatters light, but most of that light is scattered at the same wavelength that the laser hit. You shoot a green laser at some stuff; we'll usually see mostly green light. But Raman was clever enough to figure out that there’s a very, very tiny fraction of that light that’s actually modified by the intrinsic atomic structure of the stuff that you're hitting with the laser. And that stuff scatters a very, very tiny portion of the light at a different frequency or a different wavelength. Raman had this cool setup where- you know, they didn't have lasers at the time, so they had filters, and actual sunlight. So, you would sit in the bright sun with your telescope and your filters, and you would look at these very, very hard-to-see, they were very tiny amounts of photons. Well, when I was doing my dissertation, we were trying to figure out a way to turn that phenomenon into something that would produce very big signals, so that you could look at very diffuse things like gases. So, we wanted to be able to tell what’s in this gas mixture. We have a very powerful tool invented by C.V. Raman, known as Raman spectroscopy, but you know, the signals are really tiny and hard to measure. Our big contribution was figuring out that we could use an optical wave guide. So basically, this is through launching laser light down a hollow tube that’s lined with reflective metals inside, and integrating a bunch of signals from a very, very diffuse medium like a gas inside the tube, that we’d like to measure, in order to measure the constituents of that gas very, very quickly. So, in our setup, you'll shoot a laser down a reflective hollow capillary waveguide filled with a gas that you'd like to analyze, and we collect a very, very large signal, in a very, very short period of time, that’s sort of the fingerprint of that mixture of gases. And using spectroscopy, we can then, relatively quickly, and when I say relatively quickly, I mean within about a half a second, determine, fairly accurately, what’s in that mixture of gases. And like I said, this was a project funded by NETL, and it went into producing the Raman gas analyzer that we've now tested all over the U.S. and with some of our colleagues around the world. So that little breakthrough, you know, how do you get a big signal out of something that doesn't produce a big signal normally and use that to produce a research-grade instrument.

Zierler:

Now in terms of applications, where would this research be applied? What problems would you be able to apply this to?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, there are a bunch of problems in energy, in the modern energy infrastructure system, that we can use this instrument for. What it was designed for initially was looking at better ways to deal with combustion systems that run natural gas and also other renewable fuels. So, in various places, there are energy generation facilities that run natural gas turbines. So, they have a big ginormous house-size turbine engine just like the ones you see on airplanes, but much, much bigger, that are burning natural gas to generate electricity that we all use. Well, there are a lot of opportunities for the operators of these systems to use fuels that are both renewable and freely available, to help both reduce emissions and to reduce the cost of electricity and increase the reliability of power generation. You often see suppliers that will take gas literally out of a landfill. So, you've got a garbage dump sitting here rotting, right? Well, we can tap that landfill and collect the methane and hydrogen and other useful fuel gases that come out of it, for free. Then those gases don’t end up in the atmosphere, and a lot of them are greenhouses gases, so we don’t want them in the atmosphere. And we can burn them, create some electricity in a gas turbine, and release some carbon dioxide, or sequester the carbon dioxide, which is a much, much environmentally better alternative than letting that gas escape into the atmosphere and contribute to the greenhouse effect. So unfortunately, when you do switch one of these ginormous turbine systems from natural gas, which is available in a pipeline, but you have to pay for it, to landfill gas that’s free and would like to get rid of it, but maybe is a lot lower quality, et cetera, you can do terrible things to these turbines. So, if you just try switching from A to B with a valve, your turbine will explode in a very impressive and violent fashion (laughter). What this machine allows you to do is actually measure the composition of that fuel gas before it reaches the turbine, so that you can safely and efficiently switch between the two. So, instead of going from supply A to supply B, maybe you'll ramp up supply A, a little bit, and ramp down supply B, a little bit, until you've completely switched your turbine over to the alternative fuel supply. Alternative fuel supplies is definitely a big application. That’s really the one it was designed for. But as we're finding, there are a lot of other neat applications that you can use this sort of machine for. So, for instance, there’s a new plant being built in Pennsylvania, designed to take natural gas feedstock and turn it into things like plastics, at the end of the supply chain. In that process, you do a lot of chemical reactions with the natural gas and the subsequent products, to try to produce a pure output stream of ethylene plastics. And all along that process, there are chemical reactors that you can monitor using this exact same Raman gas analysis instrument. So, you can do the process faster, you can do the process cleaner and more efficiently, by knowing exactly what your reactants and products are at any point during that stage using one instrument.

Zierler:

Were you thinking specifically about a career in the world of energy, as a result of your dissertation?

Buric:

I would say that didn't come along until I got an offer at NETL and decided to direct the remainder of my career towards that type of research. So no, I didn't know I was going to be in energy. I really like it, because honestly, it’s one of the bigger problems that faces the whole human population right now. We've got great robotics. We've got great computers. We've got advanced medicine, and all these other things. But we're limited by this sort of miniscule supply of energy that we can provide the world with fossil, nuclear, and renewables, and others. So, increasing that energy supply and making it clean, making it environmentally friendly and sustainable, is really our main focus, and I'm glad I’m working here now, because the problem is important, and I hope I can contribute a tiny bit.

Zierler:

After you defended, did you have that opportunity at NETL right away, or that came after a period of time?

Buric:

So, I was hired at NETL less than six months after I defended my dissertation. And it became clear, in talking with the management there, that there were really some great problems to work on, and there was a great place to do it, and that I could really fit in well with that community of energy researchers who were engaged in these types of complex problems.

Zierler:

And when you came on initially, was it as a contractor of a federal employee?

Buric:

Oh, it was as a federal employee right off the bat, which I'm very thankful for. I do have to say, it is a government service job. So, I always encourage people to go into government service, because it is a place where you really can benefit the population at large. But, in being a service job, they definitely—you won’t make as much money as your friends in private industry, maybe off working for some tech startup or something like that. So yeah, if being rich is important to you, don’t go into government work. But the other benefits are astronomical.

Zierler:

Now, because you had experience with NETL as a graduate student, you pretty well had the lay of the land down by the time you started full-time there.

Buric:

Oh, to some extent. There are always these interesting new opportunities that open up. And the lab has really changed a lot during the time that I've been there. We've really become more integrated into the national lab system. So now, I work with collaborators from a number of other national labs. We have, for instance, a project going on in sensors for nuclear reactors, working with some great people from Idaho National Lab. So, when I started at NETL, it really was largely—my world was largely fossil energy centric, and we were focused on problems in cleaning up fossil energy, making fossil energy work better. Because honestly, it’s going to be around for some significant period of time; we've got to make it work well now. But since then, we've realized that a lot of the things that we're doing are applicable to all kinds of other areas of energy. And there are other people out there in nuclear, as I mentioned, for instance, that want to use our technologies, that we now collaborate with. So, when I started, it was a little more single-minded, and the lab was a little more directly focused on its own applications. But now, I think we're a lot more integrated with the rest of the national labs, and we do a lot more collaboration with the rest of the people in the DOE system around the country.

Zierler:

And what year did you start at NETL?

Buric:

I believe that was 2010. So, I just- let’s see, I just did my ten-year anniversary two months ago.

Zierler:

Congratulations! (laughter)

Buric:

(Laughter) Thanks!

Zierler:

Michael, I wonder if you can give sort of a- to zoom out, a little bit, an overall sense of the structure of NETL. What are the different laboratories? What are the different divisions? How well do all of these different moving parts work together? How stove-piped are the different aspects of NETL? I wonder if you could just speak generally on that.

Buric:

Oh, sure. So NETL is a fairly large organization. We're talking about hundreds of people and dozens of principal investigators and researchers. We actually were integrated originally from a number of independent federal research sites. So, there used to be sort of a mining research facility in Pittsburgh, and there was a Morgantown research station. Eventually, we integrated three locations: one in Pittsburgh; the one in Morgantown, West Virginia; and another in Albany, Oregon and then two tiny field offices. One is in Alaska and one is in Texas. So, some of the different locations that have large concentrations of fossil energy research and fossil energy industry, and we integrated those into one national lab. And that really allowed us to share resources, to augment the types of research that was done, and to produce better quality research products. This integration was well before I joined NETL, so this was a decade or more prior, when we became a national lab. Inside NETL, there are a number of divisions. I work in the Materials Engineering and Manufacturing Directorate, which sounds a little bit broad, but it’s a lot of materials science people, engineering people, and people that do things like instrument-building, like I do. So even though I'm in one directorate, we have what we call a matrixed organization. So, we tried to set up- actually our new director, his name is Brian Anderson, has been largely responsible for how well NETL works at any given time. And we've been really happy to have him on board and enabling us guys at the research level to work together in every capacity that’s necessary and appropriate. We have other divisions at NETL, like for instance we have a Geological and Environmental Sciences Division that looks at phenomenon underground. Could be for drilling applications or for other geological applications related to energy. Could be related to hydrothermal, et cetera. I work with a bunch of those guys, all the time. We look for places where those guys need the types of technology that we're producing, and vice versa. I can think of a number of sensors that we've put into geological applications because we found out that they had a need, and we had a piece of technology that fit. So, kind of being in a matrixed organization allows us to collaborate across divisions, allows us to create teams that are necessary and appropriate at the time. So, we have a whole bunch of interdisciplinary scientists working together in different groups, because they fit well for that particular problem. So, I will say there is a lot of opportunity to work with different groups within our lab or different groups at the different lab sites, so let’s say in Albany or in Pittsburgh, and with different research groups around DOE. So, it could be at INL, as I mentioned, for example, or Oak Ridge, or any of the others.

Zierler:

Michael, given that you do have that broad perspective in terms of your collaboration with other scientists at other national laboratories, given that NETL occupies that unique space within the DOE national lab system, that it is a government laboratory and not a contractor laboratory-

Buric:

Right.

Zierler:

-does that play out in any tangible way? Do you notice or can you sense any differences in the way NETL conducts its business as part of the DOE formally, as opposed to how things work at other national laboratories?

Buric:

Well, so as you mentioned, NETL is government-owned and government-operated, as opposed to, most of the other labs are government-owned, contractor-operated. So, the difference there I think is that the government at large has a little bit more say in the direction of the research, as opposed to a contractor-operated lab that, eh, maybe has a little bit more commercially oriented focus. So, I’d say that sort of imparts a little bit of benevolence that doesn't exist in some of the other labs, making a little better environment to work in, and making our research products a little better. So, I'm definitely a fan of the government-owned, government-operated model, although we are unique at this point. And coming from the small towns of Pittsburgh and Morgantown, the model really works well. The community gets a lot of benefits out of the lab. So, the other thing is, our lab is really- I want to say a lot more community-oriented than some of the contractor-operated labs. So, you would think that being government-operated would somehow make you more detached from the society at large and from the people around you, but it really does exactly the opposite. It gives them more of a say in what we're doing. I think we have a little bit more exposure to the public, and a little bit more accountability to the public at large, because we're run by the government. We have to be completely transparent. We have to be completely open about what we're doing. And to some extent, we have to have some buy-in from the people around us, in what we're doing.

Zierler:

What was your first project when you got to NETL?

Buric:

Ah! Okay! So, when I started at NETL, and this was a decade ago, I was the expert in Raman gas analysis. So, I had built this really neat gas analyzer in the lab, and it was super-fast, and it did everything it was supposed to, really well. But then, the management and the senior scientists came to us and said, “All right, you work here now. We're going to make this thing that you built an actual instrument that you need to take out into the real world and show and prove that works in an industrial setting and does what it’s supposed to, out there.” So now, this is a completely different set of problems. It’s not what the physics guys do- try to make the thing work in the lab, prove your idea is good, and write a paper on it. Well, this is the portion where you take all that information, and you actually produce a working industrial machine. And so, my first work assignment at NETL was producing this portable industrial version of the machine that we had conceived of as a grad school project. We did that successfully. I was able to visit a whole bunch of neat industrial sites, where we field-tested the machine and got real-time data from real operating turbines and rotating machinery. We did some testing with GE, with solar turbines later. We also did some testing at one of the only large gasifiers that exist, at the National Carbon Capture Center, in Wilsonville, Alabama.

Zierler:

In terms of the hierarchy and the reporting structure, if you can give a sense- who did you report to, and who did your boss report to, and how far up did that go before you got to the director of the lab and then ultimately the leader of NETL entirely?

Buric:

Well, I want to say that- you know, we do have a management structure, and there is a direct chain of accountability in that structure, but the person you're really most accountable to as a scientist is yourself (laughter). I don’t think any of those guys are- so, when I started work, I started collaborating with a senior researcher named Dr. Steven Woodruff, who has now become very respected in the world of Raman spectroscopy, in the world of laser safety, he was our first laser safety officer at the site and in numerous other fields. We worked together for a number of years, before Dr. Woodruff retired, on some of the same projects. And he was, I would say, the first colleague that I was accountable to. And of course, he was accountable to me as well. We had a supervisor. I believe that was Dr. Randy Gemmen. And of course, Randy has a supervisor, and he had a supervisor, and I think his supervisor was the director of the lab. So ultimately, we don’t see a ton of interference from our management, provided things are going well and along the right track. We can access a lot of their resources and get help from these people if we're running into trouble or there’s some issue or some funding issue or some technical issue. And those people are there to do reviews and things. We do have a well-established review and evaluation system. But I've never really seen any of these structures as prohibitive or working in the wrong direction for us. I think largely they're really more intended as a support structure for scientists, rather than a set of people to order you around and tell you what to do.

Zierler:

I'm curious what your sense was at NETL, as a PhD scientist who could have pursued an academic career. You could have been a professor, right? In what ways is your work amenable to academic collaboration, where you're reading the same journals, you're writing in the same journals, you're presenting at the same conferences that you would have in a more traditional academic career? What opportunities does NETL provide in that regard?

Buric:

Oh, I would say the job is largely very similar to being a professor at a university, except we really don’t have to fight for tenure, in our field (laughter). So yes, we go to the same conferences, we write for some of the same journals, we read some of the same journals, and we collaborate extensively with a number of professors around the country. One of my good colleagues at NETL, Dr. Paul Ohodnicki, recently decided to go be a professor at Pitt in materials science. So, we had collaborated closely at the lab, for a very, very long time, and now we collaborate closely with him being a professor and me being a staff scientist at NETL. So, I want to make sure I mention these relationships with different research groups and different professors around the country are really one of the most valuable things that we have. So being able to share ideas and being able to share graduate students and equipment and all these other things with different researchers is really helpful. That’s really what helps move the research along quickly and get to good results faster.

Zierler:

Michael, I'm curious, with that initial project that you had, given the fact that there was an expectation that you needed to be able to demonstrate its utility in the real world, in an industrial setting, in what ways, intellectually, academically, scientifically, in what ways was that useful to you, as you were developing your career?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, it definitely gave me a better perspective on what people in industry really need and how you can effectively work with industry to bring about conclusions that are useful and valuable to a company or an organization. So, I guess I didn't have a complete picture of what drives innovation in industry. And innovation in industry is a black box, completely. I'm sure plenty of people have written books about it and whatnot. But really getting a feel for what industry requires and how to work with them to give them something they need is a whole new ball of wax.

Zierler:

Maybe this going to sound like a naïve question, but wouldn't GE have-

Buric:

(Laughter) There are no naïve questions.

Zierler:

(Laughter) Wouldn't an enormous outfit like GE internally- wouldn't they have the kind of laboratory or research infrastructure where they would be able to answer these questions themselves? In other words, what unique offerings does NETL have that even an enormous corporation like GE would not?

Buric:

Oh, sure! Well, at GE, they do have an extensive research department, and they've got a number of research scientists and engineers, many of which I'm friends with now, since we've done these couple of projects with them. They do have an extensive set of resources, and they could look at these problems themselves. But, in the world of science, we get to a point of specialization where, you know, I probably know some things that maybe nobody else in the world knows. And I'm sure some of their scientists know some things that no one else knows, including me. So, the value proposition for industry is accessing those people and those resources that are really good at a particular area or a particular question in science. I also want to mention that, you know, we're a government lab. We don’t sell anything. We’re not out to make a profit. Our main mission is to invent new technologies that make it better for everyone else, and we get these technologies to industry, who then makes them and sells products and produces things. So, we sort of have a- I want to say a humanitarian mission, with respect to U.S. commerce. We're trying to make things run better and make things cleaner for everyone, make things more efficient, more profitable for everyone. And each individual company out there already contributes taxes to this process. And all of the companies will eventually benefit from these new technologies coming out. So, although we're working with one particular company to develop one particular technology, eventually the benefits of that technology make it to everyone. So, companies in private industry realize this. They're all too eager to take advantage of the for-free government research that’s always coming out and made freely accessible to the public. So, it’s really a symbiotic relationship between us and industry.

Zierler:

How does it work if you have an idea that is patentable? Something that deserves to be patented, that has commercial viability? How might that work within the infrastructure of NETL?

Buric:

It’s actually really pretty streamlined at this point. I've been an inventor on a number of different inventions. I have a whole bunch of U.S. patents, and a few more always making their way through the patent system. There was a change in patent law several years back which actually made this process a little bit simpler to us. We moved to sort of, well, what they call the first-to-file system, as opposed to the thing we had originally, which was the first-to-invent system. Well, under the first-to-invent system, you would approach the U.S. Patent Office and say, “All right, I invented this on January 1st, 2012,” and you would show your lab notebooks to prove it, and all those types of things. Well, now, we went to a little simpler system, in which they don’t really care exactly when you invented the thing, but they care when you made it to the patent office with your patent application ready to file. Under that new system, NETL has also sort of streamlined their underlying processes to make it a little simpler for us to invent things and us to produce new IP. Basically, we'll invent something—you know, we'll come up with something, and talking amongst yourselves, you realize, “Hey, this is new. I haven't seen this in the literature anywhere.” We'll do sort of a search and try to figure out if anyone has come up with a similar idea or what sort of similar ideas are floating around out there. And when we're reasonably sure that we have produced something new, we have contributed a new piece of information to the world, we'll go to NETL and we'll file what they call a Report of Invention. This is just a short form that’s basically a summary of what you've invented and what’s novel and what literature you've searched through to prove that your idea is novel. Then, NETL has an internal Invention Review Board. That Invention Review Board will look through all the Reports of Invention, and you'll go before the Invention Review Board, and you'll make a short presentation on your new idea and why it’s so valuable and what we should do with it. The Invention Review Board takes a look at that and makes sort of an executive decision on whether, yes, it is new, or maybe no. Maybe someone has seen that idea before, or there’s something similar out there that one of the Invention Review Board members knows about. So, if your idea is really new and interesting to the Invention Review Board and seems to have some commercial merit, so is probably going to be useful to someone in the world, then they recommend that your invention go to the Patent Office. Actually, we have a patenting department that the DOE runs out of Chicago. So, we have a bunch of patent lawyers that work in Chicago, and they’ll take your Report of Invention, and then they'll work with you to write a full patent application, which then gets sent to the Patent Office. And then we negotiate with the Patent Office on what we've claimed, and if they think that what we've claimed as an invention is reasonable, they'll issue a U.S. patent. And then it goes through the patent issuance process that everyone is familiar with.

Zierler:

Michael, I'm curious, either based on your own sensibilities as a scientist or your work requirements, have you moved on from project to project where you've basically left something behind, and you don’t return to it? Or are there always things to return to from your previous project as you go on to the next endeavor?

Buric:

Well, there’s always one or two projects that lose interest, or eventually a new technology comes out that’s, you know, clearly better, or clearly superior. And we want to make sure that we don’t do work that’s not important to someone, so we do leave those projects behind. And it’s always fine to take a piece of research that you thought was very important but now you have new information and you don’t need to waste time and resources looking at that old project. That, I would say though, is not the norm. The norm is that when you identify a new technology, you keep seeking new applications for it, or new ways to improve that technology, or new ideas you can combine with that technology to produce other things. So we often will start a project, do a really good portion of work on it, write some papers, write some reports, maybe patent something, and then often you'll end up hiring new people to explore different avenues of that original area of research. So, maybe you'll hire some contractors or a postdoc or something like that, to continue that work and pursue it, because, well, you can’t pursue everything all of the time. There are always too many projects for any given one person. So, if there’s something that we see as really valuable but we don’t have enough time for the fifty-seventh thing on our list- we can only do fifty-six right now, we'll hire some new talented people that are maybe also experts in a related area or experts in that exact thing, if you can find them to continue that work and do more wonderful things with it.

Zierler:

What would be an example of a research endeavor that was overtaken by events, either politically, either technologically, either administratively, where you said, “We're going to put this one on the shelf and we're going to move on to other things?”

Buric:

Well, I did mention that we did some cryogenic hydrogen sensors for NASA as part of my master’s thesis. As you know, the space shuttle is no longer flying, and we no longer need miles and miles of hydrogen pipes. So, that project went away a little bit. I haven’t done a whole lot in hydrogen sensors for a very long time. But now, the strangest thing has happened recently, DOE has gained some interest in what they call the new hydrogen economy. So, we see hydrogen as an alternative fuel source, something that we can make with a number of renewable systems. We could make hydrogen using the sun, for example, and then store the hydrogen and use it later as fuel. Well, some of the same ideas that we had originally been using for cryogenic hydrogen sensing we think might now be useful for pipelines that are running combinations of natural gas and hydrogen for this new hydrogen economy work we're all talking about. So, that’s maybe a poor example because, well, we dropped it off for five or ten years, and now we're sort of picking things back up again. Which we always like to see old useful technology being able to be used in a new, interesting way. But that’s just the kind of thing that happens in science. Sometimes interest waxes and wanes in different areas of technology.

Zierler:

And to flip that question in its head, since you started a decade ago, what are the lines of research or inquiry that have only gotten more important, that have gotten more intensive, that have drawn more interest within and beyond NETL?

Buric:

Oh, sure. Well, I want to speak maybe a little bit in general on that. The field of sensors is- we always report this when we're talking about Reports of Invention, we always are interested in reporting how much our field is growing and how valuable it is in the world. It’s a several-billion-dollar market. And it keeps getting bigger and bigger every year. So, we see more scientists working in sensors, which really accesses a lot of the areas of basic physics all the way to applied engineering. So, we're seeing more science people in this area. We're seeing more startup companies producing interesting new things. But also, the world of optics in general. I learned most of my optical science in grad school. And the field, ever since I graduated, has been getting larger and larger. I work with SPIE quite a bit. It’s a professional organization centered around optics and photonics technologies. And that professional organization has been getting larger the entire time I've been a scientist. Now they have conferences with thousands of people involved. So, the fields have been growing in optics and in sensors, and to some extent, I think in all of science. We're becoming a more advanced society as time goes on, right? We're all getting more science in our daily lives, and we're all getting more technology in all these devices we carry around. It’s really doing well for the field of science.

Zierler:

On that note, Michael, I want to ask a question that might connect sort of your day-to-day with the larger benefit to society as you're talking about. So, maybe I can frame the question almost if you can imagine concentric circles, with you right in the middle, where you have this expertise that in certain areas nobody else does. So, there’s you and your area of expertise. Then the next circle would be your immediate research group and your closest collaborators. And then it would be the laboratory environment, and then it would be NETL, and then DOE, and then, you know, keep on going out until we get to, as you were saying, the way that science is influencing all of us on a day-to-day basis. So, what is that through-line? What connects all of those circles, starting with you and going all the way out to for the general benefit of human society?

Buric:

That’s a tough one. I was just watching an interesting lecture from a gentleman from Caltech that was produced by the Royal Institute. And it reminds me that there’s one version of Schrodinger’s equation that covers the entire universe, right? We're all basically the same—we're all the same quanta. We're all covered by this same interrelated entangled state of things. We may not see that immediately, but in our lives, we can certainly see that as time goes on. So, the technology that I'm working on, and my research group is working with, and maybe then NETL finds out about and the rest of the world finds out about, does take quite a while to propagate. So, time is a big variable in Schrodinger’s equation, right? And hopefully the stuff that we're working on right now, ten or twenty years from now might be a staple in the world, in the world around us, might be a common ubiquitous technology. And unfortunately, there’s often not too much we can do about the time delay. So, it does take quite a while for these new technologies to develop and for our ideas to disseminate within the population at large. So, although we are intrinsically entangled in a quantum mechanical kind of sense, (laughter) it might take years for our ideas to propagate throughout that system entirely.

Zierler:

How do you connect your research with the broad mission of NETL to make available energy sources as useful, clean, and safe, as possible?

Buric:

Oh, sure. It’s a direct connection. So, we're literally working on stuff that you will someday see in power plants, you'll someday see along pipelines and in nuclear reactors and things like that. So, the technology that we're using directly translates into, let’s say, a reduction in cost of electricity for everybody, or a reduction in the CO2 in the atmosphere for everybody. So, we're literally making these devices- somebody is going to utilize them in some short timeframe, to make their plant a little bit better, to make their energy system a little bit cleaner and more efficient. So that I see as a really simple connection to our NETL mission to produce technology that improves the energy infrastructure and improves the environment.

Zierler:

Michael, when you talk about decades, in terms of the germination process from scientific idea to commercial viability, to legal viability, to economic viability, if you were to establish a pie chart for the various things that account for the length of this process, what are the biggest slices in that pie? Is it bureaucracy? Is it not having the right technology at the right time? Is it funding? What do you see as the biggest impediments to making that process more rapid? Because obviously, exciting technology should come to fruition as soon as possible, right?

Buric:

Right. So, this is the “Valley of Death” discussion, as we call it. Every technology undergoes- goes through the Valley of Death. That’s the period where you have a really good thing that you produced, right? You produced a machine or a sensor, if you're me, or some new device, and you'd like that device to get adopted by everyone, get used in a widespread fashion. Well, there’s the period where that device gets adopted, right? You actually need people to pick it up and use the thing. To buy one, right? Energy is unfortunately very, very conservative in their approach to new things. So, if you're running a gas turbine plant, that gas turbine plant sees very, very little changes over time. Because you want the thing, but you built the thing to be reliable and operate for many, many years without any sort of changes. And we're coming along saying, “Hey, we have this neat thing. It’s going to give you 3% more efficiency, and you can buy one for five grand and install it in your system and it’s going to do wonderful things for you.” And the answer you always get is, “Well, who else tried one first?” [laugh] “Who has one already?” Well, somebody has to be the first one to try one the first time and access a little bit more risk to do so. So, there’s always some cost, and there’s some risk associated with adopting any new technology, and we're dealing with an industry that is very, very conservative with respect to new technology. So that is undoubtedly the biggest time component to the adoption of a technology. And it’s probably also some of the biggest economic component to adopting a new technology. So, those new ideas, those new systems, have to be vetted with a series of field tests, and then a series of initial adopters, and then finally the primary population of adopters in the world. So it takes, like I said, a lot of time and money, for the individual companies and entities out there in the world to get a hold of this technology, try it out, figure out that they like it, and then for all their friends to decide that they really like it and want one.

Zierler:

Michael, I'm curious, the fossil fuel energy sector, as you note, it is conservative. But I wonder at what point, if it hasn’t happened already, if you see it happening in the future, are there going to be political, environmental, and economic pressures on these industries to be less conservative, to more rapidly be open to these kinds of technologies, simply because that’s where society is headed, for any number of reasons?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, it has been playing out over the years in the energy industry. Every time some new thing comes along, it essentially makes the industry a little bit less conservative. And we saw that happen with natural gas. It became obvious at some point a couple of decades ago, well, that natural gas was going to be significantly cleaner and significantly cheaper to run and to build versus all the coal plants that we had in the United States. So that was a big driver in making the industry less conservative. A lot of operators figured out that, well, they needed to take out their coal combustors and put in a large stationary natural gas engine. So that was definitely a kick in the pants for the industry. I think we're going to see another kick in the pants in the energy industry with the new novel nuclear reactors coming out. So, I know that, again, nuclear is extremely conservative, and we haven't built new nuclear plants in the United States for a very, very long time, a lot of people say for good reason. Well, there have been safety issues. And a number of plants, we had Three Mile Island, and the recent disaster at Fukushima in Japan. And all of these things have sort of made us more conservative. But now, we've got novel advanced nuclear reactors that actually use molten salts to cool the reactors, that are I want to say intrinsically safe, or at least many, many factors, a large factor safer than what we used to have in light water reactors. So, every time there’s a powerful driving force, it really shoots us into new technologies. And I hope more of that continues, with our technologies and with things we've never thought of. So, the more new stuff we interject into the field, the better it is for all of us.

Zierler:

Michael, I want to zoom out, a really broad question about what NETL can do long-range for fossil fuels. My personal view is that it is naïve on a number of levels to conceive of what you hear as a post-carbon future, where diesel and coal and natural gas and gasoline, they're just not around anymore in any regard. My view- this is not going to happen in the next fifty years, maybe even the next one hundred years. That’s not to say that there aren’t major problems if we just continue on the way that we are. So from an economic perspective, from a health perspective, from a carbon emissions mitigation perspective, what’s the most exciting, long-range work that NETL is doing to ensure that these widely accessible and by and large cheap energy sources can continue to be used in the most responsible way, thinking about health and economic viability, and climate change?

Buric:

Sure. So, NETL has a large program in carbon sequestration. And you may or may not have heard about all the work that we've done in this area, but essentially, it’s a simple way to go from lots of carbon to zero carbon, with a little increase in cost. So essentially, we've paved the way to being able to sequester carbon and still use these technologies for some period of time into the future, until we come up with the next big thing or figure out how to do renewables better, et cetera. So, I have a little piece of work in that, in that we're building sensors for carbon sequestration. And when I say carbon sequestration, what you should think about is basically taking all those emissions that we produce in either prior generation or chemical processes or transportation or whatever, collecting them, and putting them underground, or in a storage reservoir, where they can sit for the rest of human existence, basically, or until we find another use for all that CO2 that’s stored underground. We already do it with oil. You know, we have a huge petroleum reserve, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve the DOE runs. We already do things like enhanced oil recovery, where we pump some of these greenhouse gases into oil wells to produce more oil. Now we're just really talking about doing it on a little bit larger scale. So, capturing emissions from a bunch of plants or a bunch of producers, and collecting them and putting them where we can keep them out of the environment. So that I see as being the next step. We're going to be doing more sequestration. We're going to be increasing our capabilities in that area, so producing new technologies for separating CO2. That’s actually a large research department in NETL, is separations and membranes. And we're going to be employing this technology to be able to more responsibly use some of those fuels. Looking even further into the future, we might find ourselves in more of a production rather than an energy generation economy. So, if we've got the energy production problem solved outside of fossil fuels, then we've got all these great feedstocks in natural gas and coal and oil, for making other stuff out of. We're still going to need plastic, and we're still going to need all these materials that we use nowadays that are generated from fossil feedstocks. So, we're going to probably be directing more of our technologies into cleanly and efficiently producing byproducts from fossil fuels, rather than just burning them. I wish I could remember who said this one, but at some point, our grandchildren will look back in history and say, “We had all those great molecules, and we just burned them?” (laughter)

Zierler:

Right (laughter). Michael, to go back to that same question with GE, given that you're talking about tackling what I would say pretty uncontroversially is some of the most important questions facing humankind, that would suggest to me that there are all kinds of government and private institutions, academic institutions, who are working on these problems. So, with that in mind, what is the unique framework or offering that NETL presents to really be at the forefront of these major civilization-wide issues?

Buric:

Well, I want to say the cool thing is that being a GOGO lab, being a government-operated lab, we're doing it for free. If you're at a private company and you develop products, you sell something or other, it’s really hard to justify some huge portion of your budget to look at some scientific technological issue that may only gain you a very, very small profit margin. So, industry definitely wants to do these things, but unless you're a very, very large company with a big bottom line and lots of fat in that bottom line, you can’t devote large portions of your budget to that sort of thing. So, by letting the government execute this research, we get a large enough entity to actually look at the important problems. So, we're a big lab. There are dozens of other big labs in the same system. And we really have the resources to really be able to act on the big problems. I know you've seen some of the big projects around the world like National Ignition Facility or CERN, right? These are the areas where you absolutely need an organization as big as a federal government, or as big as multiple federal governments, acting together to solve the problems. No one in industry has that capability. No one is big enough. It’s literally a problem where the whole world needs to come together and act on it in a coordinated fashion to produce results.

Zierler:

Michael, on that note, and of course I'm asking you only in your capacity as an individual, not representing NETL or anything like that, but I do want to ask- from an outsider’s perspective reading the headlines, there are very sharp political disagreements in Washington about using coal, about a post-carbon future. At least insofar as the headlines look, there are these disagreements about where we should go as a society with regard to energy. From your perspective, how do those political differences filter down into what’s happening on the day-to-day level at NETL? Do you feel those political differences, or are they really not relevant to your day-to-day?

Buric:

We, to some extent, do have exposure to the political world, initially in that Congress essentially allocates line items in their budget for specific areas of research that they’d like to be looked at. They decide which areas they’d like looked at, and they decide how much money they’d like to spend on each area. So, that is something that Congress actively does, and we definitely see the results of that. Otherwise, there’s not quite as much influence at our level from the big decisions being made in Washington. I will say that it became a little bit more difficult with the recent trade difficulties with China, it became a little bit more difficult to employ Chinese foreign nationals. And there are a lot of good, intelligent people that I want to say escaped from China to come here and do research in the free world. And we have always welcomed those types of people and given them the opportunity to work in science in the Western free world where they can really make big contributions, and essentially everyone benefits. It did become a little bit more difficult to work with some Chinese foreign national researchers while those complications with the trade war and with various questions about China were going on in Washington. So largely, there isn’t- Congress and the administration aren’t sticking their thumb on us, trying to get us to do one thing or another, but they do sort of provide this general guidance through the large budget line items and through their directives that eventually filter down through DOE. So no, they don’t put their thumbs on us and, at least in our little area of science, aren’t really pressuring us to do A or B. But the general guidance and themes of what is sort of most important to us and what we’d like to see as a bigger focus do make their way down, and we do respond to them.

Zierler:

On the question of international affairs, what do you see happening in places like Europe and Asia that are really exciting in terms of the way these societies are dealing with energy issues? And what opportunities do you see for collaboration where NETL can have a leading role not just in the United States but globally?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, there are a number of institutions around the world that do a great job. We mentioned CERN, and I just can’t say enough about the exciting new sort of quantum physics stuff that’s coming out of CERN, that I think all of us in the general population kind of have a very limited understanding of. But man, the God Particle? Like, what is that all about? (laughter) So, yeah, the rest of the world is doing an excellent job in a few really important areas. And I think it’s our job and our responsibility to contribute as much as we possibly can to those areas of science. So yeah, I would like to see NETL do a little bit more with some of the big international energy projects that are out there. Right now, they're building a whole lot of—at least in the past let’s say decade or so- they've built a lot of fossil energy infrastructure in China. Here in America, we probably could have contributed technologies. We probably could have made some of that infrastructure quite a bit cleaner. But we didn't have a big role there. So, I’d say in international collaboration, there are definitely places where we're lacking and should really focus our efforts to contribute more.

Zierler:

And within the federal world, outside of the Department of Energy, what would be some of the most efficacious agencies to work with, in the realm of international affairs? I'm thinking like the Department of State, USAID. What opportunities would there be for NETL to work with partners throughout the federal agencies to do these things internationally?

Buric:

Yeah, there are definitely a few opportunities that exist. I know the Department of State had run sort of a visitor program, or some kind of a visiting researcher program, where you could go off to State and work there for a few months, and experience what they do, and help do some of what I'm talking about. So, the opportunities definitely exist, but on sort of a smaller scale than I think we need in this space. So, I’d like to see more of those type things, where we collaborate with State. Also, probably a lot more opportunities to even collaborate within Department of Defense. We have a worldwide presence with the Department of Defense. We have essentially military bases all over the world. And that really should produce a whole lot more opportunities for getting our technologies into some of these countries and collaborating with some of the major institutions there. So, I’d say State and Defense could definitely help us out on this, and vice versa.

Zierler:

Michael, given the fact that at NETL, you have opportunity to work with graduate students and postdocs, looking at what they're doing sort of as the vanguard of the next generation of scientists coming up and starting their careers, what are the kinds of things that that new generation of scientists are most interested in, and what might that tell us long-term where the field is headed?

Buric:

Well, there’s- speaking for all the people younger than me? That’s a tough one (laughter).

Zierler:

(Laughter) At least the people that you work with.

Buric:

Sure, sure. So, we've definitely seen a greater level of comfort with some of the complex simulation tools and things that exist, in the younger generations of postdocs and students and such. Whereas when I was going through school, it was a lot more difficult to build a ginormous computer simulation, build finite element models. You know, model that whole engine in your car and see how the crankshaft is twisting around while the thing is moving at 5,000 RPM or something. These sorts of simulation tools didn't really exist at the time, or were far, far slower than they are now. And nowadays, we see grad students that are operating finite element analysis packages on a cheap laptop they bought off of Amazon, with a student license that they got for free. So now those huge tools are really accessible to these people. I'll also say there is a greater deal of comfort in the space of AI and machine learning. So artificial intelligence a few decades ago was something I don’t think many of us understood. Now it has made its way into every time I search on Google, there’s an artificial intelligence, there’s a deep learning algorithm helping find the thing I'm looking for. My lasagna recipe or whatever. So, there’s definitely- through greater access to high-power computing technology, we see a lot more familiarity with the ability to do simulations, and the ability to do complex math problems, and the ability to do artificial intelligence.

Zierler:

To go back to this idea that science is converging more, that the traditional lines or delineations between disciplines are becoming less relevant—insofar as this affects energy, is there a future at NETL where we don’t have this divide between renewable and non-renewable energy sources?

Buric:

Well, so, as you know, there’s the National Renewable Energy Lab. This designation hasn’t necessarily emerged because we have different people skilled in different things; it has emerged because we have leaders in politics and government who decided that this thing was important, so they're going to build a lab, and this thing is important, so they're going to build another lab. That’s really the place where the delineation has come from. I think in the future, there’s a possibility that more collaboration happens between those individual spaces and we start to sort of cross-pollinate more ideas between the renewable space and the fossil space, or the nuclear space, et cetera.

Zierler:

So, in that regard, how might your skill set be applied, either for you personally or for the people that you mentor, in the world of solar, or wind, for example?

Buric:

Well, in that respect, I like to give the example of harsh environment sensing. A large portion of what I do is sensing in some of the toughest environments on the planet. We look at boilers and turbines and places that are erosive and corrosive and hot, and thousands and thousands of degrees. The same sorts of harsh environment problems exist across all of the energy spaces, simply because they’re high-energy systems. So if you look at what they call solar/thermal, basically where you have a huge field of mirrors in the desert, right, and all the mirrors are directing the sun, up to a tiny little point at the top of the tower, usually filled with a molten salt that’s collecting heat from the sun- well, that’s another really harsh environment, very similar to let’s say a molten salt nuclear reactor, or a high-temperature boiler, even. So, some of the same environments exist. Some of the same skill sets that apply to all of the different areas, and we can cross-pollinate ideas and share technologies through all of those different areas.

Zierler:

On the question of studying harsh environments, I'm curious if you've ever looked into biomimicry, the kinds of animals that live, you know, at the bottom of the Marianas Trench with no sunlight, or single-cell organisms that live on the side of a hot geyser, things like that? Have you ever been able to take any cues from the biological world, see what works for them, and apply that to your field of interest?

Buric:

Well, to some extent. I will say that a lot of scientists get in trouble for ignoring the natural world, so we always try to avoid (laughter)- we always try to keep in mind what’s going on in nature while we're developing technology that looks like it has nothing to do with nature. A lot of photonics has come out of the natural world. So, for instance, you can look at iridescent moth wings and learn a lot about thin-film science and the optics that goes along with thin-film science. At NETL in particular, we have a number of researchers that are looking at the biological genome in different subsurface environments. Because it turns out, all of those microorganisms play a huge role in what we get out of the ground when we go mining for fossil fuels. So, that’s just one immediate area where biology has a direct effect on the industry and on what we do with those byproducts.

Zierler:

To bring the story right up to the present, what are the kinds of things you've been working on in the past year or so?

Buric:

Oh, in the past year, actually I've picked up a whole bunch of new, interesting projects, and I've sort of been I want to say the de facto head of the optical sensing group here at NETL. So, we've got projects in natural gas pipelines. I know after the Macondo well disaster and a few other sorts of high-profile things that happened in the world of oil and natural gas, there has been a lot more interest in making the natural gas infrastructure and the entire energy infrastructure really a lot safer in the United States. So, I've got a couple of projects associated with that. I would like to be able to tell you when your natural gas pipeline is going to fail. And I mean more like, “Your natural gas pipeline is going to fail 2.3 years from now. Go out and service it at kilometer 115 to 125 and we can prevent that.” That’s the kind of sensing technology we're trying to introduce there. We've also done a lot more work in energy infrastructure. So, we've got a program going on with the Grid Modernization Lab Consortium to build advanced sensors for the electric grid. So we’d like to do things like predicting the failures of large transformers that are about to fail or have some limited-service life, and predict when that item is actually going to cease to operate so we can replace it well ahead of time and sort of increase the security of the electrical infrastructure and the reliability as well. So those are two new areas. We have also had a new project that started last year that’s funded by ARPA-E. That’s sort of like DARPA for energy, advanced research projects. And in this one, we're looking at mapping the temperatures inside some of these new advanced nuclear reactors that use molten salts. So, it turns out these reactors, like I said, are a lot safer than the traditional reactors with light water that we've been running, but they're a brand-new type design, and we need to know things like what’s the distribution of temperature inside this churning, radioactive vat of hot salt, one of the harshest environments you can think of. And ARPA-E liked our idea of using single-crystal optical fibers to do that. So, we're now doing a lot of work in manufacturing single-crystal optical fibers which are literally very, very long crystals like sapphire or YAG, made into a fiber. So, we've been using those as high-temperature sensors for the nuclear world. Lots of interesting new stuff going on here! (laughter) I just wanted to give you a flavor of a couple of them.

Zierler:

Michael, for the last part of our talk, before we look to the future, I want to ask sort of a broadly retrospective question about your career. Going back to this idea of the Valley of Death, ten years seems relatively short in terms of that long-term germination from idea to widespread adoption. But I wonder—within those ten years, have you experienced the satisfaction of seeing an idea come to fruition, become widely adopted, and seen its positive societal impact? Is ten years enough for you to have experienced that cycle?

Buric:

I want to say ten years is just starting to get to the good stuff (laughter). So, we have a number of new technologies, like I said, that are undergoing field testing, that are out in the world right now being looked at by energy producers and device manufacturers, that are starting to come up the other side of that Valley of Death. So, while the goal of widespread adoption of some of these things is still just a little bit into the future, we're really excited about that period of time, as we're entering it now.

Zierler:

Michael, of course one of the unnecessary byproducts of scientific success is reward with additional administrative duties. As you conceptualize your career going forward, it’s so obvious you're a science guy, and you want to always do the science. What might be your game plan as your career advances that you can maintain an interest and a day-to-day experience in the world of science as inevitably you take on additional administrative duties, and you increase in seniority in NETL?

Buric:

Well, I want to say the most important thing is to never stop going to the lab. Never stop doing actual experiments yourself. Never think you're too good to participate in putting some gloves on and mixing some chemicals together, right? That’s ultimately the important part. It’s the thing I find the most fun to begin with. So, I have no plans to give up actual scientific work, even as the administrative stuff continues. But you're completely right; there are many, many more administrative duties as you work through your career in science. I now manage a lot more people doing a lot more experiments than I do myself. So, it just has to be that way as time goes on. But I never want to lose sight of actually making it into the lab. Every time I- when we have new management brought on board, it could be a new director or new team leader, et cetera, I always encourage them to do management by walking around, and at least visit the lab, see what we're doing, see- get your hands into an experiment wherever you can, safely, and keep generating that hands-on knowledge throughout your whole career. So that’s what I plan to do. That’s what I encourage everyone else in science to do as much as possible.

Zierler:

Michael, two last questions. For the first one, as you look toward the future—and as you say, at ten years, you're just getting to the good stuff now- to go back to our original conversation, at the beginning of our conversation, where there’s this divide between applications and basic science—so in the world of applications, the things that motivate you as a scientist, and the things that motivate you as a concerned citizen, intellectually, do you tend to keep these things separate, or are they the same for you, in terms of your motivations to contribute?

Buric:

I would say that people that have the biggest problem with this delineation are the people that work in, let’s say, weapons technologies. And that’s something I've never been interested in, and I've never looked at. So, I really view the body of work that I'm doing as being both interesting in science and being useful for concerned citizens, for people that want to improve the world around us. So, I see those two going hand in hand. And I don’t have any ethical reservation about any of the work that I'm doing. I largely see it as being helpful to the world, helpful to the society around us, and, as a bonus, intellectually interesting.

Zierler:

Yeah, yeah. So, Michael, on that note, for my last question, looking ahead—ten years, we're just getting to the good stuff now. As we look to the next twenty years, the next thirty years, for the remainder of your career, what are the things that you're most excited about, both scientifically and as a citizen? What are the things that you are most excited about and most optimistic in terms of contributing to these enormously important questions as they face society?

Buric:

Oh, sure. So, the world around us is one of the most interesting places in history (laughter). We've got massive science projects. We mentioned a couple of them, like CERN and NIF. Technologies like lasers, have only been around since, what, about the sixties? So, we're really just at the beginning of this whole new area of exploration. Growing up as a kid, we watched some of the first space shuttles go up. These were our first foray into regular space travel, where this is like just a normal thing. And now we've flown an international space station for quite a while now. That was completely not even dreamed up before we were around (laughter). So, all these exciting new areas that have just come out in our lifetimes are really encouraging for the remainder of the work that we do. So, I'm excited to see what happens at CERN. I'm excited to see what happens in nuclear physics. I'm excited to see what happens with microgravity and new technologies in space. And I'm excited to see what’s happening with all the new forms of energy, in renewables, in storage, and clever uses of the fossil energy. So, we live in a great time right now, and I don’t want to forget about that (laughter).

Zierler:

And as you've so eloquently conveyed, NETL is right in the middle of all of these things.

Buric:

Right in the middle! (laughter)

Zierler:

Well, Michael, it has been so fun spending this time with you. I really want to thank you for doing this and for giving me the opportunity to learn more about all the vital and important work that happens at NETL. And for all of us, good luck in your future. I really appreciate it.

Buric:

Thanks, David! Great talking to you! I enjoyed it quite a bit as well.

Zierler:

Great.