His first job involved taking bacterial samples of Clostridium acetobutylicum from 40,000-gallon (roughly 150,000-liter) fermentation tanks of corn mash.
[3] In autumn 1922 he enrolled as a full-time chemical engineering student at Terre Haute's Rose Polytechnic Institute but continued to work weekends at CSC.
This new job put him into contact with the Wisconsin professors Edwin Broun Fred, Ira Lawrence Baldwin, and William Harold Peterson (1880–1960), who were part-time consultants for CSC.
[5] In the summer of 1927, he was the coauthor, with W. H. Peterson, Edwin Broun Fred, and Elizabeth McCoy, of a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
At various times in his career, he taught courses in soil microbiology, bacterial physiology, history of bacteriology, and writing scientific reports.
[11] He played a major role in a project, supported by the National Science Foundation, that prepared a new set of high school textbooks in biology.
[12] In a scientific breakthrough in 1949, Martin D. Kamen and Howard Gest (1921–2012) reported that the photosynthetic bacterial species Rhodospirillum rubrum fixes nitrogen.