Alumni Spotlight: Tom Chunat '86

At age 22, chemical engineering alumnus Tom Chunat ’86 sold most of his belongings and moved to UC Davis to become an unlikely first-generation college student. Though he started out terrified and on his own, he soon fell in love with the community and used the connections, curiosity and hands-on skills he gained to become an innovative engineer and corporate leader.

“At first, it was a little overwhelming, but when you’re surrounded by brilliant and inquisitive minds, you take a step back and look at the world differently,” he said. “It made me think that maybe I can do more than I thought I could, or what I was told I could, and it just made me curious.”

Growing up, not much was expected of Chunat. He came from a poor blue-collar family with alcohol problems and his sixth-grade teacher told him that he would never amount to anything. He left home not long after his 17th birthday and was forced to finish high school early and start working to pay for food and rent.

After five years, he felt like he was at a dead end and decided to take a chance and attend college.

“There’s a lot of people like me who don’t take that chance because people have told them they won’t make it, but there was that sort of defiance on my side,” he said. “Like, ‘What do you mean I can’t do it? I should at least try.’”

Taking a Chance

Chunat started as a chemistry major but switched to chemical engineering after a professor advised him that it might be more practical.

“I didn’t have a 100% understanding of what a chemical engineer did, but I knew it was using chemistry and creating things and both of those were things I liked to do,” he said.

As he learned more about the field, he found a home in the department’s unit operations laboratory, a lab where students could develop and build their own pilot plants for new technology. It was his first exposure to hands-on engineering work and got him thinking about real-world applications.

He made the most of the space in his senior year, during both his senior design project and an independent study, where he designed and built a new apparatus for students to use. The experiences taught him how to work with people and embrace failure while giving him confidence in his abilities.

“That experience in the unit operations laboratory was one of the things that inspired me,” he said. “Like, ‘I have an idea. I can go build, I can build a process, I can build a pilot plant.’ It also got me excited about how things work, and I just followed that passion.”

Finding a Community 

Chunat was drawn to UC Davis by its biking culture and strong community and he found that the campus and town had everything he needed.

He found good mentors in Professors Emeritus Alan Jackman and Dick Bell, and a friend group in the campus American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) chapter. Some of his best memories are attending and organizing AIChE picnics, campouts, houseboating and skiing trips that gave him the time to truly get to know his classmates and professors.

“What’s uniquely different about UC Davis was that I knew everybody in my class — everyone,” he said. “It felt comfortable and close and that was pretty wonderful.”

Moving Forward and Giving Back

Two weeks after graduating with a B.S. in chemical engineering, Chunat was flying across the country to help French company Air Liquide start new production plants. After working there for seven years and traveling around the world, he moved to the refining industry and worked his way up to managerial and eventually executive positions.

Today, Chunat is the director of technical excellence at Motiva, a refining and petrochemical company in Houston, Texas. He loves being able to contribute to both corporate strategy and innovation while integrating technologies like computer modeling, drones and AI/machine learning into the refining processes.

“It’s really, truly exciting, which is why I’m still working when most people my age are retired,” he said. “Every day, I go to work at something new and exciting and there’s just a ton of satisfaction in it.”

Chunat feels blessed to have had the opportunity to solve problems from multiple different perspectives, and he says it wouldn’t have been possible without the curiosity UC Davis instilled in him.

“It was that curiosity that kept me challenging myself and wanting to do more, looking for challenges and unique problems to solve and then to have the courage to try something that hadn’t been done, or to continue to do something when others have failed,” he said. “The climate at Davis allows you to build that curiosity.”

Chunat tries to give back by sharing his story to inspire others and serve as a role model. He advises students to remain open-minded and embrace failure as a way of learning.

“Think about what we can do and don’t focus on what we can’t do,” he said. “I think that brings a lot more satisfaction. You also need failure for success. I learned a lot of what not to do early in my career and that allowed me to learn what I can do and what I’m capable of.”

Chunat is still good friends with several of his classmates, and kept up with Jackman and Distinguished Professor Ahmet Palazoglu for many years. He also still feels connected to UC Davis and tries to visit campus when he can — especially the still thriving AIChE chapter.

“It’s wonderful to maintain a connection with UC Davis,” he said. “[The community] offered me everything I needed and it just felt right to me.”