Email hunting

"Diamonds are forever. E-mail comes close.”-- June Kronholz (born 1947), American journalist

What if you find a patent of interest and want to contact one of the inventors listed for that patent?  How do you find the inventor’s email address?

Here is a case study that can help.  It is not infallible … but who is?

First, the steps in the procedure are …
Find a patent of interest
Determine the name of the Inventor you want to contact
Ascertain the Original Assignee
Search for email address patterns for the Original Assignee
Use the patterns to create likely email addresses for the Inventor

We’ll begin with the following patent, which turned up during a recent Google® Patents search. Let’s pretend that we want to find an email address for inventor William J. Novak.

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PATENT
Low temperature adsorbent for removing sulfur from fuel
Original Assignee
Exxonmobil Research And Engineering Company
Inventors
William J. Novak, Joseph E. Gatt
Publication number: US20130109895 A1
Application number: US 13/622,043
Publication date: May 2, 2013
Abstract
The present invention relates to methods for removing sulfur from a hydrocarbon fuel or fuel precursor feedstream, such as methods comprising contacting a hydrocarbon fuel or fuel precursor feedstream having a relatively low sulfur content with a sulfur sorbent material comprising an active copper component disposed on a zeolitic and/or mesoporous support under conditions sufficient to reduce the sulfur content by at least 20 wt % and/or to about 15 wppm or below, thus forming a hydrocarbon fuel product. In some advantageous embodiments, the contacting conditions can include a temperature of about 392° F. (about 200° C.) or less.
Free Full Text Source: https://www.google.com/patents/US20130109895
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Google® the Assignee: email Exxonmobil Research And Engineering Company

One result …

Digital Refining - ExxonMobil Research and Engineering
www.digitalrefining.com/74,sponsors,ExxonMobil_Research_and_Engi...‎
tsl.email@exxonmobil.com ... ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company is a wholly owned research and engineering subsidiary of Exxon Mobil ...

It appears that people who work for the ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company will have emails with the extension @exxonmobil.com.

Google®: "email * * exxonmobil.com"

Note that the quotes are important.  They instruct the engine to search for the string as a phrase.  The asterisks are important, too.  They are wildcards which instruct the engine to search for anything that happens to occupy those positions in the search string.

Two results from Google® reveal two patterns …

daniel.bilbao@exxonmobil.com
mary.c.weichel@exxonmobil.com

Now we Google®: William J. Novak “email * exxonmobil.com”

Again, note the quote marks and the asterisk.  This search results in the following article …

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Maximising premium distillate by catalytic dewaxing – DigitalRefining
Free Full Text Source: www.digitalrefining.com/data/articles/file/1351675167.pdf
by T Hilbert - ‎2011
Tim Hilbert, Mohan Kalyanaraman, Bill Novak, Joesph Gatt, Béatrice Gooding and Stephen McCarthy ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (EMRE).
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Browsing to the end of the article, where brief bios of the authors appear, we find another clue …

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Bill Novak is Senior Engineering Associate in ExxonMobil Process Research Laboratories, where he is responsible for new leads and licensing for hydroprocessing and coordinates intellectual property for hydroprocessing and lubes. He has over 30 years’ experience in oil refining technology, mainly in hydroprocessing, reforming, FCC and lubes.
Joseph Gatt is a Senior Researcher in ExxonMobil Process Research Laboratories, currently working on new leads in hydrotreating and dewaxing catalysis, centring on diesel and biodiesel operation. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from Purdue University.
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Aha!  Our inventor William is also known as Bill.

Now we can construct several possible email addresses for the inventor …

Bill.novak@exxonmobil.com
William.novak@exxonmobil.com
William.j.novak@exxonmobil.com

Caveat … I have not tested any of the email addresses, so all three may be bogus.   But there is a high degree of probability that one of them will turn out to be genuine.

One thing that is not bogus is this blog (www.desulf.blogspot.com) … follow it and let your colleagues know about it.  They will thank you for the tip.