  | Soft spoken Chemistry Professor Jimmie Oxley is a world-renowned expert in the thermal decomposition of highly energetic materials. | ||||||||||
Explosives ExpertBy Laura Nelson She’s soft-spoken and attractive, and she doesn’t like loud noises. Not quite the kind of person one would imagine when thinking of explosives experts. Yet that is exactly what Jimmie Oxley, professor of chemistry and world-renowned energetic materials expert, is. Jimmie Oxley’s research specialty is explosives—specifically, the chemistry of thermal decomposition of highly energetic materials. The field encompasses a lot more than just working with TNT and pipe bombs. While Oxley has done research on, and contributed her expertise to, high-profile terrorist bombing cases such as the 1993 World Trade Center attack, her work is focused more on safe handling of everyday energetic materials than terrorism.
Nonetheless, the U.S. government relies on Oxley and others to provide valuable research into terrorist bombs and explosives. “We do a lot of work for government agencies on what are called ‘terrorism opportunities.’ For example, I will be sent bomb recipes from terrorist cookbooks and asked what the authors are trying to make,” she says. “It can be quite difficult because often the recipes have been translated from another language to English and back again, so things get lost or muddied in the translation.” Recently, Oxley completed one of the most ambitious studies ever done on pipe bombs involving a 60-pipe bomb. She has received funding from a consortium of government agencies for another pipe bomb study in which she will look specifically at finding correlations—such as how far out fragments fly—that can be passed on to law enforcement agencies. “This is not about examining a specific bomb, but more about establishing a scientific basis for what you see in pipe bombs,” explains Oxley. “This research is important because when law enforcement agents go to court, they need to cite scientific studies to prove their cases.” Oxley and her students are also working on an explosives database for the Department of Justice that tracks all the properties of certain types of explosives and centralizes the information for law enforcement officials. Other research she is involved with includes development of better small-scale predictive tests and explosive detection. Oxley’s students conduct their research in a sophisticated laboratory in Pastore Hall that is equipped with a variety of chemical instrumentations: gas and liquid chromatrographs, mass spectrometers, NMR and microcalorimeters, and various commercial explosive detectors. Just how did Oxley get involved in such an unlikely field? Before she and her husband, fellow URI chemistry professor Jim Smith, came to Rhode Island in 1995, she taught at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (now New Mexico Tech), where funding for explosives research was plentiful. She also did a sabbatical at Los Alamos working in the explosives group there. “The real reason I got into explosives is because that’s what the government was funding then,” notes Oxley. “If I were starting today, I might be working in environmental chemistry because that’s what the government is funding now.” Oxley’s personal life is no less busy than her professional life. She and her husband are the parents of two small boys, one 3-1/2 years old and the other four months old. Oxley often finds herself struggling to juggle both work and family responsibilities. She stays up late many nights after the rest of her family has gone to bed to finish articles or grade tests. “Being a college professor is a lot harder than it may appear,” she says. “It’s like running a small business. In addition to teaching and research, you need to find the money to do the research and then write the reports that confirm that you’re doing the research.” Despite the pressures of work, Oxley seems to be thriving at URI. In addition to her teaching and research, she is also the co-director of the Forensic Science Partnership, an initiative she helped found. She remains refreshingly enthusiastic about her profession. “One of the things I love about my job is that it’s never boring. I get to work with a lot of interesting people, both students and non-students.” |
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