The leaders of a central Iowa company that makes chambers for laboratory research are being named Iowa’s Small Business Persons of the Year by the U.S. Small Business Administration. Joni Campidilli is a vice president at Percival Scientific, which employs 86 people in the Dallas County town of Perry.
“We build environmental chambers for lots of different research needs,” Campidilli says. “For instance, we build chambers for plant growth. We build chambers for insect research. We build chambers for really anything a researcher might want to test an environment with.”
An example of one of the chambers the company builds (Percival Scientific photo)
The smallest chamber, or benchtop, is about the size of a small refrigerator and they can be as large as walk-in rooms. Percival Scientific built the chambers in the butterfly house where the fragile creatures emerge at Rieman Gardens at Iowa State University.
The company has evolved dramatically over the decades, as it opened 135 years ago in Des Moines with a focus on selling butcher tools and animal hides.
“They transferred into a more of a refrigeration company, and then they moved to Boone, Iowa,” Campidilli says. “That is where really our current business began in the 1950s we began doing this work, really at the request of Iowa State University. They asked us to build the first plant growth chamber, so that’s where the business started in this direction.”
Now, more than 150 different models of the company’s research chambers are being used in all 50 states and in more than 79 countries worldwide. Campidilli was asked what she thinks helped to set Percival Scientific aside for this statewide recognition.
“We are a very unique, niche company in the state of Iowa that does just some fascinating, neat things,” Campidilli says, “and I think that we promote the workforce and the employment in our area, in our community, and yet we’re still a global, international company that does a lot of business internationally.”
As Iowa’s Small Business Persons of the Year, Campidilli and her colleagues (president and CEO Jake Oakland and VP of Sales Jamie Jackson) will represent Iowa at National Small Business Week in Washington D.C. in May. They’ll be in the running for National Small Business Persons of the Year.