Steve Wilhelm is a Kansas City native. He spent his childhood in the East and Northeast neighborhoods and attended Northeast High School. Through his junior year in high school, he received a solid education at Northeast, but had no inclination toward college. During the summer of 1970, after his junior year in high school, an opening to attend college came from the American Chemical Society’s Project Catalyst. With a $500 stipend, he spent the summer in the Chemistry Department at UMKC, cleaning some glassware, but spending even more time in classes and discovering that college level work was difficult but possible. At the end of the summer, with encouragement from Eckhardt Hellmuth, Professor of Chemistry, he stayed at UMKC instead of returning to high school.

While at UMKC, he took the required courses to complete a B.S. in Chemistry, graduating in 1974. His education at UMKC well prepared him for graduate school. On application to graduate schools, he was admitted to Brown University in Rhode Island, where he studied Chemistry and also explored environmental studies, working under Harold Ward, Professor of Chemistry and founder of the Center for Environmental Studies.

After three years of graduate school and still looking for a thesis topic, in 1978 he took a job with the US Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., where he worked in the Toxic Substances Control Program. There he decided to take up the challenge of dealing with large sets of alternatives using incomplete data sets. Returning to Brown University in 1980, with financial support from the US government, he completed a dissertation by 1981 and was conferred the degree of PhD in Chemistry.

After a brief return to Washington, D.C., he moved back to Kansas City where he was an instructor in the Chemistry Department at UMKC for a year and a half, teaching introductory and physical chemistry. During that time, he had the pleasure of hosting, on behalf of the Chemistry Department, a reception in his home for Linus Pauling, a guest lecturer at UMKC.

In 1983, he returned to working for the Environmental Protection Agency, in the Kansas City Region VII Office. There he worked in the Superfund Program, investigating contaminated sites and working on ways to remedy the problems they presented. He was named EPA’s Regional Project Manger for Times Beach, Missouri, and the other eastern Missouri dioxin-contaminated sites, a position he held throughout the government buyout of Times Beach. Moving to the Hazardous Waste Program, he took a position as Chief of the RCRA Enforcement Section, dealing with hazardous waste regulation violations.

In 1986, he took a job with CH2M HILL, a leading national consulting engineering firm and the largest in environmental work. Over the next eight years, he served as project manager for site investigation projects and feasibility studies exploring the problems presented by contaminated sites and options for cleanup.

Seeking to move beyond studies of sites and into actual site cleanups, in 1994 he joined a startup subsidiary of EG&G, a Fortune 500 company. The subsidiary, EG&G Environmental, was formed to bring innovative technologies to site cleanups. EG&G Environmental spent most of its energies working to bring in-well stripping technology to full market acceptance. In-well stripping technology removes volatile contaminants (gasoline, dry cleaning fluid, etc.) from contaminated groundwater. Though a lot of good work was done in moving in-well stripping technology forward, EG&G Environmental was not a financial success and was closed after three and a half years.

With the demise of EG&G Environmental in 1997, Steve Wilhelm and his wife started a new firm, Steve Wilhelm & Associates, Inc., to continue development and marketing of in-well stripping technology. Over four years, SWA has completed seven projects, with two underway. Each project has contributed to further understanding of in-well stripping technology and further acceptance of this technology and its advantages in remedying groundwater contamination problems, which exist all over the United States. In the most recent fiscal year, SWA was a $1.7 million firm, and now has five employees. With further demonstration of the usefulness of in-well stripping technology, SWA hopes to be a leader in groundwater remediation in the coming years.