FIRST Center Research Team
FIRST Center Director, Sheng Dai, obtained his B.S. degree (1984) and M.S. degree (1986) in Chemistry at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China and his Ph.D. (1990) in Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is currently a Corporate Fellow and Group Leader in the Chemical Sciences Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed journal papers and holds over 14 U.S. patents. His current research interests include porous carbon and oxide materials, ionic liquids, advanced materials and their applications for separation sciences and energy storage as well as catalysis by nanomaterials.
FIRST Center Deputy Director, David J. Wesolowski received his undergraduate degree in Geology from the University of Pittsburgh in 1976 and Ph.D. in Geochemistry and Mineralogy from Penn State University in 1984. He joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a Eugene P. Wigner Fellow in 1983, and has spent his entire career at Oak Ridge. He is currently a Distinguished R&D Staff member and the Geochemistry and Interfacial Sciences Group Leader in the Chemical Sciences Division. His scientific interests include mineral solubilities and surface adsorption properties in geologic environments, and the structure, dynamics and reactive properties of interfacial fluids for a wide range of energy applications. He has served as the Secretary of the Geochemical Society (1995-2011), Board of Directors and Joint Publications Committee of the Geochemical Society (2008-2012) and Associate Editor of Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta (1992-2007).
Thrust 2 Leader, Nina Balke,
received her Ph.D in Materials Sciences from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 2006. After being a Feodor-Lynen fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the University of California in Berkeley she transitioned to the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. There she is specialized in nanoscale characterization of electromechanical effects in oxides and other functional materials focusing on ferroelectric and energy storage materials as well as in-situ characterization of solid-liquid interfaces. Her work was awarded the Department of Energy Early Career Research Award in 2011 and the American Ceramic Society’s Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars in 2013.
Cross-cut Lead, Yury Gogotsi is Distinguished University Professor and Trustee Chair of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University. He is also the founding Director of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute and Associate editor of ACS Nano. His Ph.D. is in Physical Chemistry from Kiev Polytechnic and D.Sc. in Materials Engineering from Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He works on nanostructured carbons and other nanomaterials for energy related and biomedical applications. He has co-authored more than 370 journal papers and obtained more than 40 patents. He has received numerous national and international awards for his research and was elected a Fellow of AAAS, MRS, ECS and ACerS and a member of the World Academy of Ceramics.
Paul A. Fenter is a senior physicist and Group Leader for Interfacial Processes in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division of Argonne National Laboratory. He obtained a B.S. in Physics (magna cum laude) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a PhD in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990, and subsequently was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton University and Exxon Corporate Research, continuing as a research staff member in the Princeton Materials Institute until 1997. He joined the research staff at Argonne National Laboratory in 1997 where he primarily studies processes at liquid-solid interfaces through direct in-situ measurements of mineral-water interfaces of geochemical systems, as well as electrode-electrolyte interfaces in batteries and supercapacitors. His work has led to new insights into the structure of interfacial hydration layers, ion adsorption, mineral dissolution and growth reactions, and to electrode and electrolyte structures under electrochemical control. These studies are enabled by his use and development of high-resolution synchrotron X-ray scattering techniques, including advances in phase-sensitive techniques to image total and element-specific interfacial structures, and the first demonstration of an interface-specific X-ray microscope for non-invasive imaging of sub-nm high interfacial topography. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007 and was awarded the Bertram E. Warren X-ray Diffraction Physics Award by the American Crystallographic Association in 2012. He has served on various advisory panels as well as program and facility review panels within the DOE complex.
De-en Jiang is an R&D Staff Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his BS and MS degrees in Chemistry from Peking University, and Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles. Then he joined ORNL first as a postdoctoral research associate and then became a research staff member in 2006. His research interest lies in applying state-of-the-art computational methods to important chemical systems and problems. In 2009, he won ORNL’s Early Career Award for scientific achievement. In 2010, he won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He is an organizer of six energy-relevant symposia in MRS and ACS meetings, and a lead editor of a Wiley book on graphene chemistry. In 2014, he joined the International Advisory Panel of Materials Research Express, a new peer-review journal launched by IOP (Institute of Physics) Publishing, UK.
Paul R.C. Kent is a staff research scientist in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He obtained a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1999. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and at the University of Tennessee before joining ORNL. His interests focus on the electronic structure and properties of materials and the development, and implementation of efficient methods to compute them on high performance computers. He has over 80 publications and in 2008 shared the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for peak performance. He holds a current INCITE award and is, respectively, PI and co-PI for the CNMS’s and FIRST EFRC's allocations at NERSC. He serves as a Specialist Editor at the journal Computer Physics Communications
Alexander I. Kolesnikov, Instrument Scientist, Chemical and Engineering Materials Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, holds a Ph.D. (Physics & Mathematics) form the Institute of Solid State Physics, Russian Ac. Sci., Chernogolovka, Russia. His employment history includes: Inst. Solid State Physics Russian Ac. Sci., Chernogolovka, Russia; Inst. Festkoerperforschung der Forschungcentrum Juelich, Germany; Salford University, UK; Un. Manchester Inst. Science and Technology, UK; Argonne National Laboratory, IL, USA; Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, USA. His research interests and expertise include : vibrational dynamics & structure of metal hydrides, hydrogen storage materials, carbon nano-materials, water/ice, liquids and gases under nanoscale confinement, etc. by using neutron scattering at various time and length scales. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow, and is a member of the American Physical Society and the Neutron Scattering Society of America.
Shannon Mahurin is a R&D Staff Scientist in the Chemical Sciences Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received a BS in Physics from Cumberland College in Williamsburg, KY and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the Surface Chemistry and Catalysis group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a postdoctoral research associate focusing on novel materials for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy applications and molecular transport in porous materials. His current interests include the development of nanostructured carbon materials for separations and energy storage as well as the use of spectroscopic techniques to explore fundamental interfacial interactions. He has co-authored more than 75 journal articles.
Eugene Mamontov is an instrument scientist at the Spallation Neutron Source, Neutron Sciences Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He was a postdoctoral researcher with Prof. Takeshi Egami at the University of Pennsylvania until 2003, when he became a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Center for Neutron Research and the University of Maryland. He joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2006. His current research interests concern dynamics of fluids in various environments.
Raymond R. Unocic is R&D Staff Scientist in the Center for Nanophase Materials Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his B.S. in Metallurgical Engineering from The Ohio State University, M.S. in Materials Science and Engineering from Lehigh University, and Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University (2008). In 2009 he joined ORNL under the Alvin M. Weinberg Early Career Fellowship, then transitioned to Staff Scientist in 2011. His research is focused on the utilization of advanced electron microscopy characterization methods (aberration corrected STEM, HRTEM, EELS, EFTEM, EDS, and in situ S/TEM) for materials research. His current research interests are centered on the development and application of novel in situ electrochemical S/TEM characterization techniques to probe site-specific electrochemical processes for energy storage and conversion materials.
Adri van Duin, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Penn State University. Employment history: 2008-Current Associate Professor at the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. He received his Ph.D. (Chemistry) from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands in 1996. He was also a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1996-2002), and then a postdoctoral researcher (2003-2005), research faculty member (2005-2007) and senior research staff member (2007-2008) at the California Institute of Technology. His research Interest/expertise include development and application of atomistic-scale simulation methods. He is the inventor and main developer of the ReaxFF reactive force field method, which enable large scale (>>1000 atoms) dynamical simulations of complex reactive materials. Applications include combustion, catalysis and material failure and nano-material design. His major awards/honors include: Royal Society Fellowship (1999), Marie Curie Fellowship (1997). He has distributed the ReaxFF method and parameter set to over 500 academic and industrial research groups around the world. Finally, he is the CTO and co-founder of RxFF_consulting.
Jianzhong Wu is a professor of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and a cooperating faculty member of Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, M.S. and B.E. in Chemical Engineering and B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Tsinghua University, Beijing. His research is concerned with development and application of statistical-mechanical methods, in particular density functional theory, for describing the microscopic structure and physiochemical properties of soft materials and biological systems.
Stephan Irle is a Senior Research Scientist in the Computational Chemical and Materials Sciences Group, Computational Sciences and Engineering Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His educational history comprises postdoctoral training in Theoretical Chemistry from Emory University (1997-1998), a Ph.D. (CHE) from the University of Vienna (1997), and a M.S. (Diploma) from Siegen University (Germany, 1992). He became an Associate Scientist at the Cherry L. Emerson Center for Scientific Computation at Emory University (1998-2006) before moving to Nagoya University in Japan (2006-2017). In 2011 he was promoted to full professor at the Department of Chemistry and became Principal Investigator of the Institute of Transformative Biomolecules (ITbM) in 2013. He is the author of over 240 refereed journal publications. His specialty is the quantum chemical study of complex systems. Target areas are soft matter and biosimulations, excited states of large molecules, and catalysis. Complementary studies of physicochemical properties, theoretical spectroscopy, and the development of methodologies including approximate quantum chemical methods accompany this research.
Alexei Sokolov
received an MS in Physics in 1981 from the Novosibirsk State University (Russia), and a PhD in Physics in 1986 from the Russian Academy of Sciences. He worked several years in Germany before joining faculty In College of Polymer Science and Engineering at the University of Akron, USA, in 1998. In 2009 he accepted Governor’s Chair position at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he leads the Soft Matter group. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement in Science. His current research interest focuses primarily on Dynamics of Soft Materials, including topics of the glass transition, polymer dynamics and dynamics of biological macromolecules, composite materials and materials for energy applications. He is an author of more than 300 papers.
Veronica Augustyn is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at North Carolina State University. She received her Ph.D. in 2013 from the University of California, Los Angeles and her B.S. in 2007 from the University of Arizona, both in Materials Science & Engineering. From 2013 - 2015, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research is focused on the synthesis and characterization of materials operating at electrochemical interfaces. In particular, she is interested in the relationships between material composition, structure and morphology and the resulting redox behavior and electrochemical mechanisms. She is the recipient of a 2017 NSF CAREER Award and a 2016 Ralph E. Powe Jr. Faculty Enhancement Award, and is a Scialog Fellow in Advanced Energy Storage from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.
Michael Naguib is an assistant professor of Materials Physics and Engineering in the department of Physics and Engineering Physics at Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Prior to joining Tulane in 2018, he was a Eugene Wigner Fellow (2014-2017) and Research Staff (2017-2018) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in Metallurgical Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering in Cairo University, Egypt. After that, he earned his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University in 2014. He is an inventor on the first patent on two-dimensional transition metals carbides and carbonitrides, so-called MXenes. He has published 59 papers (with more than 8000 citations) in international journals and presented many invited talks at number of international conferences and universities. He has received many awards, such as Robert L. Coble Award, Kroto Award, Ross Coffin Purdy Award, MRS Gold Graduate Student Award, Graduate Excellence in Materials Science (GEMS) Award, and was listed as Drexel University Forty- Under-Forty. His research focuses on the synthesis and characterization of novel materials; including two-dimensional transition metals-based materials; for electrochemical energy storage and energy conversion.
Takeshi Egami is UT-ORNL Distinguished Scientist/professor with Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and Materials Science and Technology Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received B.E. degree in applied physics from University of Tokyo (1968) and Ph.D. in materials science from University of Pennsylvania (1971). After the postdoctoral training at University of Sussex and Max-Planck-Institute in Stuttgart he returned to Penn in 1973 as Asst. Prof., Assoc. Prof. and Professor (1980-2003) until he moved to the current position. He was the Founding Director of UT-ORNL Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences. He published 1 book and over 530 refereed papers, and is Fellow of American Physical Society and of Neutron Scattering Society of America. His research interest includes physics of liquids and glasses, complex oxides, complex metallic alloys, neutron and x-ray scattering, simulation and theory.
Robert L Sacci has been a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for over 6 years and currently serves as a R&D Associate. He is a principle investigator in both the Fluid Interface, Reaction, Structure and Transport (FIRST) EFRC and Materials Science and Engineering Division both funded by the Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences. Before ORNL, he received his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and his Ph.D. at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia under David Harrington. His scientific research centers on interfacial reactions, and more specifically, designing techniques to study the dynamic evolution thereof. He has contributed in the development of in situ electrochemical electron microscopy, neutron reflectometry, and small angle neutron scattering. His work has been recognized by the Electrochemical Society (Graduate Student Awards, 2010 and 2011), the Microscopy Society of America, Postdoctoral Award (2014), and ORNL (Significant Achievement Awards, 2016 and 2017).
When not in the lab, at a computer, or running late to a meeting, Robert enjoys playing tennis and board games, hiking, cooking, improving the house, and spending time with his wife and three kids.
Hisu-Wen Wang Wang is Early Career Research Scientist in the Geochemistry and Interfacial Science Group, Chemical Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Her education history comprises postdoctoral training in neutron scattering from Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories (2011-2014), a Ph.D. and M.S. in Mineralogy/Geochemistry from Indiana University (2005-2011), and a B.S. in Earth Sciences from National Cheng Kung University (Taiwan, 2003). She established herself as an expert in total scattering techniques, contribution new insights into local order in both homogeneous and heterogeneous material systems. Her research interests remain in garnering molecular-based interpretation of scattering results, and insight into complex functional materials, both bulk and nano, through advances in structural characterization. She has been listed as review editor for the journal of Frontiers in Energy Research.
Marek Pruski is a Senior Scientist in the Division of Chemical and Biological Sciences (DCBS) at Ames Laboratory, where he develops and uses solid-state (SS)NMR techniques for the studies of energy relevant materials. He received his Ph.D. in experimental physics from the N. Copernicus University in Torun, Poland (concluded in 1981), and post-graduate training at the University of Leipzig, Germany, and at Ames Laboratory. He worked as a Visiting Professor at the University of Lille, France (in 1998 and 2000), University of Caen, France (in 2003 and 2009) and Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan (in 2011). Between 2010 and 2017 he managed the Ames Laboratory Catalysis Program and currently serves as the interim Director of the Ames Laboratory’s DCBS. He is the author of over 210 refereed journal publications and serves as a member of the editorial board of Solid State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance.