Biographical Text
Professor Emeritus of Chemistry James Wesley Buchanan (May 5, 1937-), was born in Union Mills, North Carolina. He graduated from high school in Hickory, North Carolina, in 1955. He attended the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill from 1955 to 1959, where he was a John Motley Morehead Scholar. Buchanan was awarded an A.B. degree in chemistry in 1959. His graduate degrees include a M.S. degree (chemistry) from the University of Florida (1962), a Ph.D. degree (radiation chemistry) from the University of Florida (1968), and an M.B.A. degree from Wake Forest University (1974). From 1962 to 1963, Buchanan served as instructor of chemistry and physics at The Woman's College of Georgia, and he attended graduate school at Duke University during the 1963-64 academic year. He was head of the chemistry and physics department at Gaston Community College from 1964 until 1966. During the summer of 1965, he did radiation chemical research at the University of Tennessee under a National Science Foundation summer faculty grant. From this research he published (with Ffrancon Williams) a paper on the radiolysis of liquids (Journal of Chemical Physics, 1966). Buchanan joined the faculty of Salem College, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in 1968, as assistant professor of chemistry. He was associate professor and head of the Department of Chemistry and Physics from 1970 to 1975 and taught general, inorganic, and physical chemistry. During the summers of 1969 and 1970, he worked as a staff chemist at the R.J. Reynolds laboratory in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, publishing (with Karol J. Mysels) a paper on very small film contact angles (Electroanalytical Chemistry and Interfacial Electrochemistry, 1971). During that same period, three papers from his dissertation research in radiation chemistry were published (with R.J. Hanrahan), concerning the effects of Cobalt-60 gamma radiation on phosphine and phosphine-ammonia systems (Radiation Research, 1970). In 1975, Buchanan left Salem College and assumed the position of senior environmental chemist in the Environmental Engineering Division of the Research Triangle Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. There he did contract research funded by the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He wrote numerous air quality data assurance manuals, which were used for both ambient and industrial air sampling and analysis. Dr. Buchanan joined the faculty of Appalachian State University as professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry in 1977. In 1981, he resigned as department chair and assumed full-time duties as professor of chemistry. Buchanan taught general, inorganic and physical chemistry lectures and laboratories until 1992, when he retired from teaching. From 1990 until 1996, he directed the University's Program for the Study of Environmental Change, an administrative unit which helped procure funding for faculty engaged in various types of environmental research. Buchanan directed the M.S. degree research projects for five graduate students. All projects concerned various aspects of air monitoring and associated atmospheric chemistry. He procured funding for these students' theses projects from the United States Environmental Protection Agency and from the (then) Duke Power Company. Publications resulted from two theses, one involving particle source assessment near Spruce Pine, North Carolina (Journal of the Air Pollution Control Association, 1984), with J. Breiner. The second concerned a refinement of the potassium tracer method for measurement of residential wood smoke (Atmospheric Environment, 1989), with C. Calloway, S. Li, and R. K. Stevens. In 1982-83, Buchanan was granted an off-campus leave and worked with Professor Brian Thrush at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. Their research involved use of a tunable diode laser to measure recombination times of atmospheric radicals, and resulted in a publication (with G. Tyndall) in Chemical Physics Letters (1983). He returned to Cambridge University in the summers of 1984 and 1985, continuing his work with Professor Thrush. After his teaching retirement in 1992, Buchanan remained at Appalachian State University as an adjunct professor until 1996, after which he was awarded emeritus status. Source: Appalachian State University files. -Patti Levine-Brown
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