Return to Decades of Research.

For Rubin Battino, professor emeritus of chemistry, the chance to be part of Dayton history came in 1966 while he was an assistant professor of chemistry at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The Miami Valley was about to see the birth of a new public university. Battino decided to accept a position as associate professor of chemistry at what was then a branch campus of Miami and Ohio State Universities.

"I was actually hired by Ohio State. The science and engineering faculty were with OSU, and business, education, and liberal arts fell under Miami University."

One year later, the branch campus would gain independent status and become Wright State University, the region's first public comprehensive four-year university.

Battino came to WSU with a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, a fully functioning lab, and a postdoctoral student. "A moving van showed up at IIT and I packed my entire lab into the truck," he said.

It proved to be a delicate operation. Besides assorted equipment such as vacuum racks, pumps, and a large air thermostat, his lab also had lots of specialized and delicate glassware. Only one piece was damaged in the move. However, Battino repaired that himself, explaining that "scientific glass blowing was a skill I picked up in graduate school." Within two weeks, his lab was up and running.

There were other challenges as well. "There were only about 90 faculty on the entire campus. At one time, I was serving on 17 committees, on the department, college, and university level. It was a real collegial atmosphere. We were setting regulations, standards, rules. We were building a university!"

As a physical chemist, Battino has centered his academic career on the thermodynamics of solutions, which involves the physical measurements of chemical phenomena.

The work has wide-ranging practical and theoretical applications, from medical research to the environment to industry. Over the years, his work has garnered major support from NIH, as well as funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and various industry sources such as the Petroleum Research Fund.

"One of the things I'm most proud of is the work I've done with my postdoctoral students that involves the super-precise measurements of the solubilities of gases in water."

"When I say super-precise, I'm talking about hundredths of a percent, where most of the literature is, give-or-take, about one percent. It would take anywhere from 18 hours to three days to do one measurement."

His goal was to compile measurements "that would stay in the literature way beyond theories that have gone by the wayside." In fact, that's been the case. He still gets about a half dozen inquiries each year from researchers and students requesting data from his research.

In addition to publishing more than 80 research papers and four technical books, he's devoted a large portion of his career to fostering chemistry education. He's authored over 70 papers on chemical education that cover innovative teaching methods for both college and secondary-level science teachers. And with John Fortman, now professor emeritus of chemistry, he started WSU's popular chemistry demonstration shows that for over 30 years have attracted thousands of students from the Dayton region who learn the wonder of chemistry through things like exploding balloons, glowing pickles, and luminescent soap suds.

Although now officially retired, he still teaches one chemistry graduate course and supervises graduate and undergraduate research students. And, he still likes to "putter around in the lab." But it's not the same laboratory that made the trip from Chicago in a moving van more than 40 years ago. "When I retired, I basically shipped my entire lab to a colleague at Blaise Pascal University in France, where to my knowledge it is still being used."

Rubin Battino is also a licensed mental health counselor with a small private practice in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He specializes in very brief therapy and Ericksonian psychotherapy and hypnosis, and he has authored several books on psychotherapy. For more information, see www.rubinbattino.com.