Kohl, Jerome

Jerome Kohl was born on March 13, 1918, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in applied chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1940. Between 1949 and 1960, he completed a number of courses in personnel management, business law and management, oceanography, civil and mechanical engineering at a variety of institutions. Since September of 1969, Kohl has been employed as an extension specialist and lecturer in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University. As a member of the North Carolina State University faculty, Kohl has been the prime developer and coordinator of Extension services and programs including activation analysis, irradiation services, seminars, and visits to industrial plants.

From the description of Jerome Kohl papers, 1942-1995 [manuscript]. (North Carolina State University). WorldCat record id: 475729060

Jerome Kohl's career in nuclear applications--as a chemical engineer; nuclear instrument developer, salesperson, and marketer; nuclear engineering extension specialist; expert in energy conservation and hazardous waste management; and Sierra Club activist--spans over 50 years and mirrors the development of the peace-time/civilian nuclear industry.

Born in Montreal, Quebec on March 13, 1918, Kohl moved with his mother and three siblings to California in 1925. He graduated with a B.S. in Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1940, and immediately began working at the American Potash and Chemical Corporation as an analytical chemist and experimental plant operator. A year later, in 1941, he joined the Tide Water Oil Company, where in seven years he was promoted several times from Superintendent of Fluid Catalytic Cracker to Refinery Engineer. In 1945 he married Freeke Van Nouhuys. They have two children, Joyce Eileen and Adelle Patricia.

It was at Tracerlab, Inc., Western Division, where he worked from 1948 to 1960, that he began moving from a concentration in the chemical and petroleum industry to the emerging industrial applications of radioisotopes. From 1948 to 1951, as a chemical engineer, he designed and operated air sampler testing ducts and developed bulk density and concentration gauges, but as a section leader, from 1951 to 1953, he was the project engineer on Tracerlab's Mobile Radiochemical Laboratory. It was also in 1951 that he began teaching courses in radioisotopes and elementary nuclear reactor theory and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. In that same year, he participated in (non-destructive) atomic weapons tests in the Marshall Islands. Throughout the next eight years, as he progressed to Chief Engineer and finally to Manager of Engineering Development, he continued his work with radioisotope application engineering while also concentrating on nuclear instrumentation. In particular, he developed the concepts and design engineering for a line of radiation monitoring instruments.

During this time Kohl continued to lecture on thermodynamics, process instrumentation, radioisotopes, nuclear radiation, and nuclear reactor theory and engineering at UC, Berkeley (1946-1952, 1957-1958). He spent the summer of 1956 as a guest lecturer at the Delft Institute of Technology in Delft, Holland and the French Petroleum Institute in Paris.

With twenty years of industrial and teaching experience under his belt, Kohl began to focus on working with the clients of the nuclear industry when he became Coordinator of Special Products for Gulf General Atomic Division of General Dynamic Corporation from 1960-1964. Here, his principal duties were to create and develop a marketing program in support of new products. A large part of this work involved communicating his marketing analyses and program evaluations to prospective customers, both within and outside Gulf General Atomic. He also continued to teach, at UC, San Diego, from 1962 to 1964.

Kohl moved even more fully to the marketing side of the industry when he became Manager of Marketing Services at ORTEC, Inc. in 1964. For five years, until 1969, he planned and carried out promotional activities including exhibits, advertising, and brochures; handled the statistical forecasting and reporting; and trained field salespeople in the US and Europe. During this time, he also was a lecturer at the University of Tennessee (1966, 1969).

In 1969, Kohl decided to deliberately get off the treadmill of the business world, take a big cut in salary, and enter a steady state job. In 1970, he joined the staff of North Carolina State University's Nuclear Engineering Department as a lecturer and its first nuclear extension specialist. He remained in that capacity, promoted to senior extension specialist, until 1988, when he retired. As he explained to the Raleigh Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in a 1974 lecture on the Immorality of Material Growth, he realized that the activities that gave him the greatest sense of reward were those that required time and freedom rather than money: being creative, being outdoors, and, primarily, helping others to learn. He also had grown increasingly concerned about energy waste and conspicuous consumption of resources and wanted to find ways to help people learn how to better take care of the earth.

Working in extension meant an increase in his already public orientation to the world of nuclear energy, although the public now expanded outward from industry to high school and college students to community groups. He served as a public relations liaison between the Nuclear Engineering Department and firms that were planning or had existing nuclear facilities; he sought funding for and designed educational programs (manuals, short courses, conferences, demonstrations, video tapes) on cogeneration and hazardous waste minimization and management for various industries; he gave lectures on nuclear and alternate sources of energy, energy conservation, and hazardous waste management; he obtained funding for a Regional Reactor Sharing Program that made full use of NCSU's PULSTAR reactor; he produced brochures advertising the reactor and the department to potential users and students; and he testified before a number of state and federal energy committees.

That Kohl was successful in reaching a wide number of people with information that they could use can be seen in the number of letters of appreciation he received and in how much in demand he was as a speaker. For example, his lecture Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow on power generation for the NC Attorney General's Staff Conference on the Environment in 1972 blossomed into a three-part lecture circuit in 1972-1973 that took Kohl to the NC Attorney General's Conference of Attorneys, to the Southern Regional Conference of Attorneys General, and to the National Association of Attorneys General. He also received several NCSU service awards. In 1979, he won the school-wide Outstanding Extension Award from the NCSU Alumni Association. He was awarded the 1984-1985 and the 1987-1988 School of Engineering, Fairchild Industries Outstanding Extension Service Award. The commendation for the latter remarked that the leadership of North Carolina in waste minimization is in part directly related to the extension activities of Jerry Kohl.

While he was at NCSU, he also taught a variety of courses not only for the Engineering School, but also for the Department of Economics and Business and the Division of Continuing Education. As well as lecturing on applications of radiation and radioisotopes, measurement of nuclear radiation, and management of hazardous chemical and low level radioactive waste, he introduced new classes such as Venture Management, Environmental Consequences of Nuclear Power, The Energy Crisis, and Technology Assessment.

Kohl also earned an M.S. in Marine Science from NCSU in 1975 and was heavily involved with the local and national Sierra Club as President of the LeConte chapter and as a member of their Energy Policy committee and chair of the Energy Conservation sub-committee. He combined work and pleasure by traveling across the United States and overseas, observing nuclear reactors, power plants, and hazardous waste handling facilities and speaking to various groups. In addition, he pursued his photography avocation, becoming an exhibiting member and officer of the Carolina Designer Craftsmen.

After retirement, Kohl continued to work as a speaker and consultant. In particular, he was hired by the World Bank and the National Environmental Protection Agency to conduct a series of lectures and lead a five-day workshop on environmental protection and waste reduction at the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Studies in Nanjing, China. In May 1991, he spent two weeks in China giving the workshop and visiting various manufacturing plants around the country.

From the guide to the Jerome Kohl Papers, 1942-1995, (Special Collections Research Center)