A Legend of Environmental Chemistry

William L. Budde 

William L. Budde was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on December 18, 1934.   He received a B. S. in chemistry from Xavier University in Cincinnati in 1957, an M. S. in chemistry from Xavier University in 1959, and a Ph. D. in physical-organic chemistry from the University of Cincinnati in 1963.  He was a post-doctoral associate of renowned boron chemist Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne at the University of California – Riverside during 1963-1964, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kansas during 1964-1965, a research chemist at the Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City, Missouri during 1965-1969, and Associate Director of the NIH-supported Mass Spectrometry Center at Purdue University in W. Lafayette, Indiana during 1969-1970.  The director of the Purdue Center at that time was well-known and highly regarded mass spectrometry pioneer John H. Beynon of The United Kingdom.

After wandering around the country for seven years, and accumulating a spouse and five children, he finally found a real job when he was hired by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) in Cincinnati, Ohio on June 1, 1971.  He was given the charge by the USEPA to develop laboratory organic chemical analytical methods intended for use in the Agency’s water regulatory programs.  Nearly all of his work was concerned with analytical methods using combined gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS), and combined liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS).  He also devoted considerable effort, especially during the earlier years, to computer applications with analytical instrumentation, laboratory automation, quality control in analytical chemistry, and laboratory management.  For many years before his retirement from the USEPA on February 28, 2006, he worked on environmental applications of LC/MS and determinations of the structures of naturally-occurring cyclic peptide toxins.

He has been a member of the American Chemical Society since 1962 and the American Society for Mass Spectrometry since 1972.  He has lectured widely and authored or co-authored two books, twelve chapters in books, 66 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, and many government reports and other articles.  The book Analytical Mass Spectrometry: Strategies for Environmental and Related Applications was published by the American Chemical Society and Oxford University Press in 2001.  He was a peer-reviewer for several scientific journals including Analytical Chemistry and Environmental Science and Technology, and served on the editorial advisory board of Environmental Science and Technology from 1993 to 1998.  He has been a session organizer, session chair, and short course instructor at the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy and the Annual Conference of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.