Joe Fox III

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== Biography ==Joseph Mickle Fox III, PE Chief Process Engineer (Retired) WALNUT CREEK, CA UNITED STATES

WHAT IS IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO WARRANT MY HAVING THIS PAGE IN WHO’S WHO? While I have had a successful career as a practicing chemical design engineer, I now feel that my efforts in retirement are what really merit this consideration. After retirement in 1992, I sought to try something different and became an art docent at the Oakland Museum of California. Next, I started in 2004 and still administer the Fox Y-DNA Surname Project at FamilytreeDNA, giving assistance to those Foxes seeking ancestral connections. A good idea of what can be achieved by Y-DNA testing is given in my JOGG paper Y-DNA Testing of a Paper Trail - The Fox Surname Project.

I have written two family history books: Growing with America – The Fox Family of Philadelphia and Growing with America – Colonial Roots, plus a third book of historical biography:Mary Hite’s Story. These books are carefully backed up by DNA testing and include Fox connections dating back perhaps a thousand years in England. In them you will find, among other notable persons, the founder of Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, several founders of the College of New Jersey and their brother, a member of the Maryland 400 in the Revolutionary War, the builder of the first golf course in America and a sister of the mayor of Washington who experienced a miraculous recovery from cancer. These books will certainly be valuable to future generations of researchers. This effort continues.

As the ninth to carry the name Joseph Mickle Fox, I felt that I had an obligation to examine my predecessors’ lives. In doing so, I have come to realize the monumental accomplishments of our ancestors in forming a working democratic society as well as recognizing the tragic mistakes that they made.

I am also proud to have had two very successful marriages and want to credit the ladies involved: Betty Jane Larkin of Rock Island, IL, mother of my six children, and Shirley Ann Mutchler Pugh of Madison, WI, mother of three fine sons herself. Betty once told our children that they could choose any career that they aspired to and we would back them up. They did just that and we produced a snow leopard expert, a Merce Cunningham dancer, two lawyers, a rocket engineer and a Bloomberg News correspondent.

I have lived through a great period in American history, one of unbounded freedom that will be hard to sustain. I do believe in our country’s future and in the future of technology. While my technical career was, to a large degree, associated with fossil fuels, I can now see the need to move away from them. The challenge is there to retain our ancestor’s democratic principles, which were obviously just rescued for us by a pandemic. We need to capitalize on advanced technology, use it correctly and welcome people of different color and ethnicity. They are an important part of the future of this country.

TECHNICAL CAREER Mr. Fox was a chemical and petroleum design engineer who retired in 1992, following more than 60 years of work at two major construction companies, Bechtel Inc. and the M. W. Kellogg Company. He continued as a consultant for Nexant, a subsidiary of Bechtel Inc., until 2005. He worked as a process design manager in the refining and chemical division of Bechtel for 25 years. Established in San Francisco, Bechtel is an engineering, procurement, construction and project management company that is now headquartered in Reston, Virginia.

Before that, Mr. Fox worked in process research and development with the M. W. Kellogg Company in its Jersey City and Piscataway, New Jersey, laboratories from 1947 to 1966 and as a refinery engineer with American Oil in Texas City, Texas, which produced aviation gasoline for World War II, between 1943 and 1945.

An expert in the processing of liquified natural gas (LNG) and the production of synthetic fuels, Mr. Fox obtained three patents in the field of chemical reactor design. He has contributed over 20 scholarly articles to various professional journals in the areas of liquid hydrocarbon upgrading, production of transportable natural gas and production of synthetic fuels.

Mr. Fox led the process design of multiple noteworthy projects, including the 1982 New Zealand Gas to Gasoline Project (GTG), which strengthened his expertise in synthetic fuels. He was seconded to the Mobil Oil Company as their chief process engineer for much of this project. Other significant engineering projects to Mr. Fox’s credit have included the 1955 pilot plant demonstration of a gas reformer catalyst for the SASOL Project in South Africa, the design of hydrotreaters for the Syncrude tar sands refining project in Alberta, Canada, in 1975, and numerous LNG projects, beginning in 1977 with the world-class Badak LNG Project in Bontang, Indonesia.

He has maintained his involvement with several professional organizations, including as a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He served as a member of the Institute’s board of directors from 1976 to 1978 and as the chairperson of its North Jersey and Northern California sections. He was a committee member of the American Petroleum Institute and is an emeritus member of the American Chemical Society. Highlighting his accomplishments in the field, Mr. Fox was presented with a Professional Progress Award from the Northern California section of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in 1995.

Mr. Fox is an alumnus of Princeton University, class of 1944, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1943 and a Master of Science in Chemical Engineering degree in 1947, having received a Quaker Oats fellowship in 1945. He was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1943 and the Tau Beta Pi Association in 1952. He is licensed as a professional chemical engineer in the state of California.

Mr. Fox completed art docent training at the Oakland Museum of California in 1994 and served as an art docent for 20 years. He graduated from a writing course at the University of California Berkeley a few years later, leading to the subsequent publication of three books.

2021 Marquis Who's Who Ventures LLC 'A Lifetime of Achievement' Volume III page xi

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Joe Fox at registration.