Guest Series - 07 - Influences and Inspiration by Jim Hower
Who inspired you to follow your career path? Perhaps it was the high school teacher who encouraged you not to pursue a certain major in college (while this can be seen as a negative influence, in my interpretation, my history teacher was guiding me away from a dead-end career . . . and I still get to research history of the earth and of the people who developed our science).
Who influenced your science through their publications or discussions of their scientific advances? Who directly mentored you? Neither influence nor mentoring are one-off events; both should continue throughout a career. Influences can be positive or negative. Students or younger colleagues can mentor their senior colleagues.
While thinking about inspirations, I consider the “By the book” feature in the New York Times Book Review. In this question-and-answer column, authors are asked if they could invite three people to a dinner party, who they would invite and why. The invitees, not necessarily alive, are selected based on many factors, such as their literary contributions, their wit or sarcasm, among other factors. Each selection is unique in its own special way.
So, why not twist this concept into an exercise dealing with scientific influences? In my selections, I choose to only consider people who are no longer alive; after all, for everyone else, no matter where they are in the world, I can try to reach them by email, text messaging, or phone. I also limited the field to three people who might have provided insight into a specific topic of interest.
The topic:
The topic of choice is the role of the mire flora in the uptake of at least some of the elements that are organically associated in low-rank coals and their fate as coal rank increases [1] Phytoaccumulation in modern plants is a topic of growing interest.[2] The mechanisms have been studied and commercial operations for the recovery of Ni and other elements are underway. The extrapolation of the concepts to Cenozoic low-rank coal is feasible owing to the similarity of some modern plants to the, for example, Miocene flora. Both for the botany and diagenesis, an extrapolation to Pennsylvanian bituminous coal is problematical.
Now for the invitees:
Aureal Cross, with expertise in coal petrology as well as the botanical aspects of coal, had a seven-decade career in industry and academia. He was the MS advisor of both Gilbert Smith, my first boss at the University of Kentucky, and Ralph Gray. As with all of the invitees, I never published anything with Aureal Cross, but he was a trusted sounding board through the 1990’s and 2000’s.
Peter Given, an organic geochemist, was a professor at Penn State University. I took his Organic Geochemistry class, and he served on my PhD committee. After my graduation, he was not shy about critiquing my talks and posters, always offering sound advice.
Marlies Teichmüller, arguably the foremost organic petrographer of the 20th century, is an obvious choice as the third invitee. As with many of her international colleagues, we exchanged reprints of our latest papers.
Since it is my fiction, I would like to invite the early-1980’s version of them. By then Cross and Teichmüller were at the back ends of long careers (both starting in the late-1930’s) and Given was in the closing years of his academic career. As part of the fiction, even though I would prefer my 1983 hairline, I will need to be my 2026 version so that I can inform them of the current science. Curiously, by inviting 1983-vintage scientists to my 2026 gathering, I am the elder of the group. In the dinner-party discussion, I would count on all three to keep me honest in my discussions of coal petrology, the importance of thoroughly understanding the paleobotany and organic geochemistry, and the implications of the progression of coal rank to the low-rank chelation to the bituminous-rank loss of the chelating functional groups.
Inspiration can pass through time. Mentoring, although associated more with in-person interactions, teaches lessons that guide us through our careers and, in the best case, are passed along to our students and colleagues. In your version of such a dinner party, who would you invite? What would be the focus of the scientific discussion?
[1] For example:
Hower, J.C., Gebremedhin, M., Zourarakis, D.P., Finkelman, R.F., French, D., Graham, I.T., Schobert, H.H., Zhao, L., Dai, S., 2024. Is hyperaccumulation a viable model for organic associations of minor elements in coals? Earth-Science Reviews 254, 104802.
Hower, J.C., Rimmer, S.M., Taulbee, D.N., Berti, D., Finkelman, R.B., Franch, D., Graham, I.T., Schobert, H.H., Zhao, L., Dai, S., 2026. Aspects of Germanium and Nickel accumulation in low-ash coal: Examples from the Blue Gem coal, eastern Kentucky, USA. Int. J. Coal Geol. 314, 104927.
Zhao, L., Wei, Q., French, D., Hower, J.C., Graham. I.T., Smith, G.C., Dai, S., 2026. The influence of terrestrial plants on the enrichment of critical metals. Earth-Science Reviews 276, 105416.
[2] Among many papers from the past 20 years, here are three examples:van der Ent, A., Mesjasz-Przybyłowicz, J., Przybyłowicz, W.J., Barnabas, A.D., de Jonge, M.D., Harris, H.H., 2022a. Contrasting patterns of nickel distribution in the hyperaccumulators Phyllanthus balgooyi and Phyllanthus rufuschaneyi from Malaysian Borneo. Metallomics 14, art. no. mfac020.van der Ent, A., Nkrumah, P.N., Purwadi, I., Erskine, P.D., 2022b. Rare earth element (hyper)accumulation in some Proteaceae from Queensland, Australia. Plant and Soil 485, 247-257. van der Ent, A., Rylott, E.L. 2024. Inventing hyperaccumulator plants: improving practice in phytoextraction research and terminology. International Journal of Phytoremediation 9, 1379-1382.
About the Author
Jim Hower received his BA, MS, and PhD degrees in geology from Millersville University, Ohio State, and Penn State, respectively. He has been a scientist at the University of Kentucky’s Center for Applied Energy Research (CAER) since 1978 and has been an adjunct professor and, later, a Research Professor in the University of Kentucky Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences since 1981 with a research focus on a broad range of topics within coal and fly ash petrology and chemistry. As of mid-2021, Jim retired from the university, but, finding that retirement is a speedbump and not a wall, he remains active at the CAER and elsewhere. He has authored more than 575 papers in more than 140 journals and books. He was the editor of International Journal of Coal Geology and Coal Combustion & Gasification Products for 10 years each. Jim has received the top awards from The Society for Organic Petrology, International Committee for Coal & Organic Petrology, and the Geological Society of America’s Energy Geology Division. In addition, he was a fictional coal geologist in Karen Rose Cercone’s 1999 mystery novel, Coal Bones.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-hower-819b3b16/
https://uknow.uky.edu/professional-news/caer-s-hower-co-authors-pioneering-coal-book
https://www.amazon.com.au/Coal-Bones-Karen-Rose-Cercone/dp/0425166988
