Professor William Zoller should be dead.

On a frigid January morning in 1987, Zoller was driving on Highway 520 when his Mustang convertible slid on black ice. His car crashed into several others, which piled into a ditch, and his head hit the steering wheel.

Zoller blacked out. His Mustang was then hit on the driver’s side door by another car, which broke his lap belt and catapulted him into the passenger’s side window.

His car was rammed again, launching him into the front windshield and back to the driver’s side. Zoller broke his pelvis in two places, smashed every rib and lost several pints of blood by the time paramedics arrived. His heart stopped for nearly 45 minutes.

Two pingpong ball-sized blood clots formed in the front of his brain — 15 percent of its total area.

Zoller was in a coma for a week. When he woke, he was completely paralyzed. But the worse part was his acute short- and long-term memory loss — Zoller couldn’t remember who he was or recognize his wife and children.

“Then I had to restart life again, because I had to relearn reading and writing, learn who people were, how to talk again,” he said.

But he was back in the classroom teaching chemistry within nine months.

Zoller’s remarkable story of recovery against incredible odds has been profiled in newspaper articles throughout the years. He’s even been on Oprah.

His memory is still incomplete. He recalls growing up in Alaska and his undergraduate work at the University of Alaska, along with some of his graduate study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his doctorate in chemistry in 1969. But from his early 20s on, his memory becomes increasingly fuzzy.

“I remember asking my wife to marry me,” he said. “I don’t know if she accepted, I assume she did,” he added with a bit of deadpan humor. “I don’t have a past. … I read about this person whose name is Zoller. I don’t know him.”

The worst part of his short-term memory loss is not knowing what he did yesterday, something most people take for granted.

“I live with fear all the time, because I’m scared of everything,” he said. “I don’t know what’s coming up; I have no idea.”

He said that his faith in God and the support of his wife, Vivian, have helped him through the sometimes painstaking and frustrating process of relearning and remembering. Most importantly, he said his faith has helped him overcome that nagging sense of fear.

“It makes a difference,” he said. “I feel I can cope with the world; otherwise, fear is just right there.”

Before the accident, he said he was a nominal Christian and a workaholic researcher doing pioneering work on the bleeding edge of science.

“He had tons of energy and could do five things at once,” Vivian said.

His colleagues shared the same sentiments.

“He was a very high-intensity scientist,” said long-time friend Ken Krohn, a professor in the Department of Radiology at the UW School of Medicine.

Zoller had published about 150 papers by the time of his accident and was a highly paid consultant for the U.S. government’s laboratories at Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore, where he conducted innovative research into nuclear and environmental chemistry in places as remote as Greenland, Iceland and Antarctica.

The globe-trotting Zoller visited some 35 active volcanoes as part of his research, and by “visiting,” he means literally stepping into the still-smoking craters of places such as Mount St. Helens (he was the first to explore the volcano after its 1980 explosion), Mount Erebus in Antarctica and El Chichón in Mexico. His exploits earned him the nickname “Wild Bill.”

Hired by the UW to bolster its nuclear chemistry program in 1985, Zoller brought in $10 million in research money. He was told he was on his way to a Nobel Prize.

But that changed in a matter of moments.

“I was on a very fast track, and then everything stopped — a complete stop,” Zoller said. “I think God was just saying, ‘Hold on, son, there’s something I want to talk to you about, and where are you headed in your life?’ I have a totally different direction now.”

That direction is focusing on undergraduates.

“I like freshman chemistry, because if I can start people out in the right way — studying and understanding — they will go on and enjoy chemistry instead of hating it, because most people here take chemistry and hate it.”

But his success was not a foregone conclusion.

His first quarter was a grueling experience. Vivian would drive him to the UW and drop him off at his office. Zoller’s teaching assistants would lead him to and from the classroom, where he would nervously grip the podium and go through his slides.

Over time, however, he learned to cope, and then thrive, mastering the use of digital sides and pioneering the use of innovative classroom technology, such as the now-ubiquitous “clickers” used by students to answer questions in class.

Zoller teaches by utilizing a comprehensive series of PowerPoint presentations, having drilled himself on each and every detail for hundreds of hours. Over the years, he’s forced himself to memorize and categorize his science know-how.

In the meantime, the functions of the damaged frontal lobe of Zoller’s brain have moved to the back. Zoller’s mind “rewired” itself, as one of the pingpong ball-sized holes has disappeared; the other is now the size of a pea.

In the beginning, he read a textbook that he had written in grad school to help jog his memory.

The freshness of the material means that he is particularly keen on keeping his teaching as dynamic and engaging as possible. Zoller loves lab demonstrations and telling students his many scientific war stories.

“I think with teaching freshmen, if you have them learning from you or wanting to learn, you’ve won. They will learn, no matter what. But if they don’t want to and they’re fighting you on it, then you’ve lost,” he said.

He said that his drop rate is about 1 percent and nearly 80 percent of all chemistry majors go through his class.

“This is an individual who loves to teach young students about chemistry, a subject for which he has great passion, and to teach them not just the litany of facts that underlie chemistry,” Krohn said.

Karen Fincher, who has been Zoller’s secretary and assistant since his accident, said that the professor’s motivation comes from helping undergraduates learn and succeed in ways that go beyond chemistry.

“His sole purpose as a teacher is to have them achieve success,” she said.

And Fincher would know. Her two daughters took Zoller’s course, one before and one after his accident. Each thought that Zoller was the “best teacher she ever had” at the UW, Fincher said.

“He has always been very enthusiastic about teaching and made the class very interesting for them,” she said. “Because of his talent as a teacher, they were able to enjoy the class and learn about chemistry.”

Now, after more than 37 years of teaching undergraduate chemistry to 27,000 students, Zoller is preparing to retire next spring. He plans to focus on his hobbies of beekeeping and fishing, though he would also like to help people with brain injuries like his own.

Zoller credits his faith for his recovery.

“This is what God has done,” Zoller said. “I know it. It’s not what people have done, not what medicine has done. He has repaired my brain and reprogrammed it so I am able to do the teaching I’m doing and do the work I’m doing. And I just thank God for it.”