Dave DePaoli: The ‘essential mission’ of radioisotope R&D

Growing up in tiny Ishpeming, Mich., Dave DePaoli didn’t realize that less than a mile from his home was a blueprint for his own future.

DePaoli grew up near the childhood home of Glenn Seaborg, Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist. Yet he didn’t harbor a dream of following in the footsteps of Seaborg, whose work led to the concept of actinides and their arrangement on the periodic table, until he came to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1984 as a cooperative education student in chemical technology.

“I’d love to say he’s my inspiration, but I can’t say that — it was just kind of fate,” said DePaoli, now a Distinguished R&D staff member at the Lab. “The Radiochemical Engineering Development Center, where I work right now — the reason it exists is because Glenn Seaborg had a vision of how to make superheavy elements that requires the High Flux Isotope Reactor, plus a facility nearby to purify isotopes.

“I’m working where his vision came to pass, and I’m working on plutonium-238, so I’m making the isotope that he discovered. I don’t hold a candle to him, but it’s pretty cool that I get to work at a facility he dreamed up, making an isotope he discovered.”

In fact, DePaoli said, the production of that isotope has been the pinnacle of his career, to date. Working on a team of capable people to develop, from scratch, a challenging process to make Pu-238 to the specifications of NASA, which wants it for deep-space exploration, has been very rewarding, he said.

“Being able to pull together all those pieces of radiochemical engineering and put it to work — nothing else touches that,” he said.

And how many people can say their work is literally launched into space, as ORNL’s Pu-238 was aboard the Perseverance Mars rover last summer? That visibility underscores the importance of the work being done here at ORNL, DePaoli said.

“You can see how our work really has impact,” he said. “This is something everybody in our country can appreciate.”

It was that practical application that originally led DePaoli, who enjoyed all things science, into a chemical engineering career. He’s since received honors including a Young Engineer Award in 1998 from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), a 2011 R&D 100 Award for his work with a mesoporous carbon electrode for desalination, and AIChE’s Robert E. Wilson Award in 2015. In 2016, he became an AIChE fellow. With his wife and two children — now both adults —he developed a love for the East Tennessee outdoors, including hiking and mountain biking, and doesn’t miss Michigan winters.

DePaoli had been group leader for several groups before becoming head of the Radioisotope Research and Development Section in ORNL’s Radioisotope Science and Technology Division. He sees the production of radioisotopes as one of ORNL’s essential missions.

“The R&D section has a vital role of devising new ways to make radioisotopes, and to make our processes as efficient as possible because we have a limited set of resources,” DePaoli said. “It’s our duty to do that, and it’s great to see that our laboratory has identified isotope production as a focal point.”

The next steps, he said, are to continue innovation and collaboration.

“We can’t do it as individuals,” he said. “There are people across multiple divisions and directorates that make production happen and figure out how to do it as effectively as possible.”

As section head, DePaoli hopes to reignite a “level of scientific inquisitiveness” he remembers from his early years at the Lab, when collaboration and mentoring were natural results and a feeling of excitement was present.

“It was a very collegial atmosphere, but it was a very technically vigorous place, with a lot of seminars and other opportunities,” he said. “You were surrounded by a bunch of people who were excellent researchers, and when you saw them present, you felt this desire to live up to that example of research excellence. It was very dynamic.”

UT-Battelle LLC manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science.