Just 18 days into his new position as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory, Alex King feels confident his time spent in the lab will be fruitful.

Even though former director Tom Barton’s name is still on the placard outside of the director’s office of the Technical Administrative Service Facility, King has made his presence felt to the staff.

“I think it’s great. He’s jumped in with both feet, and he’s been trying to meet with everyone personally,” said Debra Covey, program manager of the Ames Lab.”I think he’s a good asset for Ames Lab, and he brings a new perspective.”

King was born in a small borough in south London called Mitchum, a town he said had no real particular claim to fame besides being located near Wimbledon, England.

His career path in the sciences began when he was 11, as his scores in England’s standardized testing regimen, then called the Eleven Plus, helped to place him and other children at the middle-school age into appropriate higher-level schools, he said.

King was admitted to Dulwich College Preparatory School, which he said had a “history of preparing people to rule the British Empire.”

A second tier of testing, called the O-level test, is administered to 15- to 17-year-olds and helps place students into colleges with a declared major. King said science had always interested him, particularly the physical sciences, so, when he was admitted to the University of Sheffield in 1972, his interest in the unknown reactions of materials was already firmly planted.

“At first, it started out with liking to solve really intricate problems, so the first part of my career was involved with that,” he said.

Taking his interest in problem solving to the next level after he graduated from Sheffield in 1975 with a degree in physical metallurgy, King completed his master’s degree at the University of Oxford in England in metallurgy and materials science in 1979.

“Some of the things metals do are really puzzling, and we don’t understand why, so ‘can you figure it out?’ And we could figure it out – and that was a real turn-on,” he said.

King said 1978 was a turning point in his career, as he made his first trip to the United States. He was invited to speak about physical metallurgy at a symposium which brought together people who are “leading lights in their particular areas” of study. The unintended benefit of the conference, King said, was that he met a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who invited him to continue his postdoctoral research at MIT.

“Around that time, as I was completing my doctorate, Three Mile Island’s nuclear reactor had a small accident, and following that, Chernobyl [in Ukraine] had a much bigger one,” he said. “And the result of that was the nuclear industry became not a very economically exciting place to be.”

While King worked as a research assistant at MIT in the department of materials science and engineering until 1981, he said he also applied his trade in “looking at microscopic defects in materials and other areas like microelectronics and silicon chips.” In 1981, he began work in the department of materials science and engineering at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, a position he stuck with until 1999.

He was both a professor and the head of the school of materials engineering at Purdue University from 1999 until 2007.

“As time’s gone by, my personal focus has changed a bit. I really like working with graduate students,” he said. “I like watching them develop. I also learned the best science is done by interacting with people who bring different skills to the table.”

Delivering on the theme of differing people bringing their skills together, King said joint research abilities was one of his overriding reasons to join the Ames Lab.

“Ames Lab does that really well. There’s a good, strong tradition of doing interactive science here,” he said. “I think that’s the real key signature strength of the Ames Lab.”

King said his mission statement for the Ames Lab is to “maintain that strength and all the things that it produces,” along with applications for a “slightly broader arena than it has in the past.” Focusing on biorenewable energies, such as ethanol, will be where the Ames Lab sets its course, King said.

“Some of the things that we want to do involve making biology do physics, like making ethanol,” he said. “So Ames Lab has some particular strength in catalysts.”