Editor’s Note: North Dakota’s leading export, the saying goes, is its youth. The standard story is that there aren’t enough economic opportunities to keep them here. Economic developers and political leaders of all stripes agree: we’ve got to keep more of our young people here and bring back some of those who’ve left. They’re looking for more people like Stanley, N.D., native Brian Tande, a recent and very talented returnee and one of the newest members of the UND chemical engineering faculty. In the following interview with Office of University Relations writer Juan Miguel Pedraza, Tande talks about where he came from, how he picked his career, and what brought him—and his wife, also a North Dakota native—back to North Dakota.

* Listen as Brian briefly talks about his background and why he returned to North Dakota.

Q. Brian, tell us where you’re from and how you got launched into a career in engineering and research.

A. I’m from Stanley, a city of about 1200 people in Mountrail County, in western North Dakota. I grew up there and went to Stanley High School; I graduated 12 years ago.

My story isn’t that different from others in this field—for as long as I can remember, I was interested in how things work. I inherited that from my dad, an electrician who works for the Mountrail County power co-op. He loves nature and science, and he encouraged my interests. My mom, a nurse in the Stanley hospital, also encouraged me. One summer, I came to a UND summer college program for kids—I loved it. I came here and learned about chemistry, physics, engineering, and math.

Q. Did you do anything special in high school to advance your interest in science?

A. All through high school, I developed my interest in science and math.  One summer, for example, I did a session at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (Terre Haute, Ind.), a small private engineering college, and worked on the aerodynamics of cars. We worked with models in a wind tunnel. Another summer, I took part in a U.S. Department of Energy honors program for high school students at the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago learning about superconductivity.

Stanley High School had no advanced placement courses, but I took math all the way through introductory calculus and did other science course there, too. It was a small school, but if offered lots of different classes.

Also, I started getting interested in engineering in high school because we toured a number of power plants, and my dad put me in touch with several engineers who worked at these plants. I knew for sure that I really wanted to explore how things were made. I went into chemical engineering kind of blind—most engineers don’t know what engineering really is until they get into it—but if you enjoy math and science, this is a great career. I was lucky to be one of those who chose my major in high school because I already knew that I’d enjoy it.

Q. Where did you go to college and what influenced your decision?

A. Well, as I said, Stanley was a small town; I graduated in a class of 37. By then I wanted to see something completely different and to meet new people so that I wouldn’t find myself hanging out with the people I grew up with. I applied to several engineering programs and chose the University of Minnesota. I’m very glad that I did that. The department had about 450 students. It was great!

Q. Were you happy with you decision to leave small-town North Dakota and go to the “big city”?

A. Yes, I was, definitely. Even though I was kind of a bookworm, I took advantage of the many things to do in the Twin Cities; I went downtown a lot because that’s kind of the hub for the area. I’d go shopping or just hang out with friends, and when I became of age, I’d party, too. I’d go to plays and my girlfriend—now my wife—and I did a lot together in Minneapolis.

Q. So you found a girlfriend in the big city?

A. No, I talked Desiree into moving down there. She’s from Palermo, N.D., and she and I went to high school and graduated together. We got married and then came grad school.

Q. What about grad school? You chose to get more education instead of getting right to work in industry?

A. Yes, I really wanted to do research. I decided on grad school after talking to my teaching assistants in chemical engineering at Minnesota. They were into research and I knew that’s kind of what I wanted to do: develop new technologies. Then my wife and I were faced with the “two-body” problem—the decision of where to go kind of came down to a school where my wife, who wanted a graduate degree in nutrition, and I could go together. We found the University of Delaware in Newark; it offered a top-10 graduate program in chemical engineering and also a program in nutrition.

Q. Where did your graduate studies in chemical engineering lead you in terms of a specialty?

A. Polymer science. Basically, we’re talking about plastics. I focused on rheology, the study of the flow properties of unusual materials.

(Editor’s note: a real basic analogy is studying how mayonnaise flows on a plate or how Elmer’s glue flows on a piece of wood, only rheology involves really exotic materials. The world’s oldest continuous lab experiment, launched in 1930, deals with flow; it’s at the University of Queensland, Australia, and involves an enclosed funnel of pitch which flows at the rate of one drop per decade. The funnel will empty its last drop about 100 years from now.)

My doctoral dissertation was on the rheology of dendritic, or highly branched, polymers, such as polyetherimide. This is a new class of materials. I looked at the properties and characterization of these materials. These have a very low viscosity and probably will be used as processing aids for other thermoplastics.

Q. OK, Brian, for those of us who are less familiar with plastics chemistry, please explain “dendritic polymers.”

A. Dendritic polymers, or “dendrimers,” belong to a special class of very large molecules. They can be used for a lot of things, such as coatings, adhesives, medical diagnostics and drug delivery systems. We also use them to build other big molecules. Unlike other polymers, dendrimers have a branched structure, which means they flow more easily than other polymers. In a sense, you could say they’re more stable.

Q. Tell us a bit more about how you developed your engineering career and how that got you and your family back to North Dakota?

A. In grad school, I had a research assistantship, and I taught a senior chemical engineering lab, though I didn’t have to teach every semester. Already in Delaware, I was looking to come back to North Dakota. We wanted our son, who was born in Delaware, to be closer to his cousins and grandparents.

But I took a job with General Electric in southern Indiana, in their plastics division working on polycarbonates, what everyone knows as high-impact lens material in eyeglasses. While working there, we had our second son in 2003, and at that point we started to get serious about getting back to North Dakota—yes, I’d have to say that getting back became much more important to us.

Shortly after that, I went to a trade show in Chicago and met up with the owner of a Fargo company, John Jambois of Tecton Products (which is affiliated with Marvin Windows and Doors) and hit it off with him.  I went to work for Tecton, which makes fiberglass-reinforced plastics, mostly for window and door frames. I started out in a research position and eventually became manager of operations. I really enjoyed making products but I was trying to think long term and was never completely satisfied in industry.

The happiest I ever felt was in grad school, working with students and around researchers—I really liked that environment. I was very fortunate that just about that time there was a chemical engineering opening at UND which was made available through a grant that included money for expanding the faculty.

I started July 5 at UND.

Q. What lies ahead for you?

A. Well, I’m teaching. This semester, two classes: Chemical Engineering 301, transport phenomena, which is a class on heat transfer and fluid mechanics, and Chemical Engineering 431, a lab for seniors.

I’m real interested in renewable energy processes and what we can do with them.

What I want to do now is to make polymers—and I’m in just the right place to do it because UND has a big program in jet biofuels. The byproducts of that process can be made into polymers. You’re making plastics out of a renewable product instead of petroleum. You add a little dendrimer to these biofuel process byproducts and you reduce their viscosity, their tendency to flow, and that makes them easier to process. They’re structurally more stable. We want to build off the biofuel program to make useful materials off the byproducts.

Second, I’d like to work on hydrogen fuel cells, specifically focused on advanced membrane materials; I want to work on fuel cell and electrolysis membranes, which are pretty much made from the same kinds of materials.

I’m in a tenure-track position, and hope to be here a good long time. I live in Fargo right now because my wife has another year of school at NDSU. Hopefully, we can all move up here next year.

I also hope to work with kids, the same kind of program I got—outreach to encourage schoolchildren to look at science and engineering as careers.

Q. Are you taking advantage of anything else North Dakota has to offer?

A. Yes, indeed, hunting. My family never did, so I didn’t grow up with it. But when I was working in Fargo, I had a coworker who got me into it. I really enjoy pheasant and duck hunting. Now I have a three-year-old German short-hair pointer who loves to hunt pheasant; my oldest son, Lucas, named her Dora after Dora the Explorer cartoon. I’ve been training Dora the last two summers. The outdoors in North Dakota are a terrific resource.