He is the former director of Center for Studies in Higher Education and the former dean of College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley.
He returned to UC Berkeley in 2004 as the director of Center for Studies in Higher Education, serving in this position for a full decade until 2014.
[7] King was also faculty senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was program leader for chemical processes in the Energy and Environment Division from 1978 to 1981.
He started working with freeze drying, which removes water by direct vaporization from the frozen state.
Although he started by measuring and explaining drying rates in terms of fundamental transport phenomena, he soon turned to learning how highly volatile substances such as taste and aroma components could best be retained despite their being much more volatile than the water which was itself being vaporized during evaporative drying.
[10] King also gave a fundamental understanding of the phenomenon of product collapse during freeze drying and how to avoid it.
He also worked with freeze concentration for beverages, such as fruit juices, wherein water is frozen as suspended ice crystals which are then filtered out.
Subsequent research supported by the U. S. Army dealt with limited freeze drying that would leave enough water to provide sufficient pliability of the product for compression to smaller size for military uses.
He prepared review articles on retention of volatile flavor and aroma components during spray drying.
[12] Some of King's research has dealt with the removal and recovery of polar organic substances from aqueous streams in two contexts.
[8] In the initial years of his research, King focused on fundamental mechanisms of mass transfer between gases and liquids.
Some of his other work dealt with systematic methods for synthesizing processes from component steps, such as sequencing multiple distillation columns and cascade refrigeration systems.
[11] King stopped chemical engineering research in 1999, part-way through his service as Provost and Sr. Vice President for the University of California, university-wide.
After the book went out of print, King secured the copyright back from McGraw-Hill and put it on eScholarship, where it is available open-access.