Twenty Years at the Top: Black Engineers of the Year

Chapter 8 Dr. William Wiley 1994 Black Engineer of the Year THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE, WRITTEN BY MELINDA COOKE, WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN US BLACK ENGINEER & IT, CONFERENCE ISSUE 1994.

Bill Wiley has spent a lifetime figuring out how to make technology work for people. Dr. Wiley is the principal executive in the Northwest for the Battelle Memorial Institute, an independent, worldwide, science-based organization dedicated to “putting technology to work.”

Wiley’s responsibilities include research, development, and technology commercialization at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory, as well as Battelle’s Marine Sciences Laboratory in Sequim and the Seattle Research Center.

Wiley, 60, who holds a doctorate in bacteriology, supervises more than 4,000 scientists, engineers, and technical specialists doing research in support of DOE missions in environment, energy, defense and national security, economic competitiveness, and education. The lab is also participating in the 30-year, $1-billion per year cleanup of the nearby Hanford site.

Born in Oxford, Miss., Wiley graduated from Tougaloo College with a degree in chemistry. After serving in the U.S. Army, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana under a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship. At Illinois, he received his master’s degree in microbiology in 1960. He then went on to obtain a doctorate in bacteriology from Washington State University in Pullman. He started his career with Battelle in 1965 as a research scientist at the Pacific Nothwest Laboratory. In 1979, he was promoted to director of research, and occupied that position until 1984, when he became laboratory director.

Wiley is presently responsible for the business operations of Battelle’s Pacific Northwest Division, which has operated PNL for DOE since 1965. As a result of his vision, PNL is becoming a major 45