EDITOR INTERVIEW
In conversation with...
Where/when were you born & bit about family/ early years? I was born in Miami, Florida, but I grew up on 50 acres outside a small town near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I was the youngest of 3 children and we had a log cabin which was heated with a wood stove. I spent my time cutting wood, riding horses and playing sports (American football and wrestling).
What did you want to be growing up? I really wanted to be an Air Force Pilot or an Astronaut growing up.
Where were you educated, and what subjects did you choose and why?
I went to Clemson University and got a BSc in Ceramic Engineering with a minor in Physics. Coming out of high school I wanted to study aeronautical engineering but there wasn’t a degree offered in-state and I had a full scholarship to Clemson. At Clemson I decided to focus on Material Science. I liked the breadth of applications and the idea of designing something at the molecular level was fascinating to me. I worked in Dr. John Ballato’s labs during my undergraduate degree on Photonic Crystals and Luminescent Sol-Gel Glass and really fell in love with the chemistry side of materials.
What was your path to higher education? I went the North Carolina State University for graduate school to begin my PhD studies in Material Science. After one year working in a cleanroom growing single crystal GaN, I decided that I really didn’t like gas phase chemistry and semiconductors. I wanted to work with more “liquid chemistry” and to stay out of a cleanroom. At the same time, I received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship to cover all my expenses, so I went back to Clemson University and got my PhD in Material Science studying plasmonic metals.
52 LUBE MAGAZINE NO.175 JUNE 2023
Jeff DiMaio, PhD, CEO, VBASE Oil Company
When and where was your first job, and what did you like about it and what did you not? After graduating I worked as a Research Professor at Clemson developing luminescent nanoparticle materials for telecommunications (fibre-optics), white light LEDs and a host of other applications. At the same time, I also began work at a small start-up called Tetramer Technologies. The company only had 4 part-time employees. I had a programme working on encapsulating quantum dots. I loved everything about the research at Clemson but I knew I wanted to work on technologies that would make it out of the lab and into the market.
How has career mapping led to where you are now?
While working at Clemson and Tetramer, I had an interview with Solvay in Atlanta, GA and it went really well. At the end of the day, I felt I had an offer coming and the last interviewer was a VP. He said he was really interested and thought I was a great fit, but he wanted to know why I didn’t want to do “the Tetramer thing.” He thought it sounded exciting and like a great opportunity. On the way home (a 2 hour drive), I thought a lot about that and decided he was right. I turned down the offer and decided to try working at Tetramer.
I figured we would go out of business in about 2 years and I would go and get a real job that was stable. Roughly 20 years later, Tetramer is still going strong, and I bought out my partners and own the company. Much of what Tetramer has worked on included developing biobased materials for industry. About 7 years ago, we were looking at a molecule and a good friend and colleague kept telling me he didn’t understand why we weren’t developing that type of chemistry into a lubricant. We had worked on base oils in the past and I trusted his judgement and persistence. So, after a few months, we raised some
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