Nazarewicz, Sumpter, Wullschleger named UT-Battelle Corporate Fellows

Witold Nazarewicz, Bobby Sumpter, and Stan Wullschleger of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been selected as 2013 UT-Battelle Corporate Fellows.

The rank of corporate fellow—among the lab’s highest honors—recognizes the researchers’ significant accomplishments and continuing leadership in their scientific, engineering, and technological fields. The addition of Nazarewicz, Sumpter and Wullschleger brings the number of active corporate fellows at ORNL to 33 researchers.

“Witek, Bobby, and Stan are honored both for their individual achievements and for their contributions as mentors and collaborators,” ORNL Director Thom Mason said. “Their superlative leadership in nuclear physics, computational chemistry and materials, and climate and environmental sciences, respectively, has advanced the frontiers of knowledge across fields of critical importance to ORNL’s mission.”

Nazarewicz is an international leader in theoretical nuclear physics and is widely recognized as a principal driving force behind research on the physics of exotic nuclei. He has published more than 350 journal articles with 16,000 citations, has given more than 480 invited talks, and is the recipient of the prestigious Bonner Prize in nuclear physics from the American Physical Society. A Physics Division staff member since 1996, he served as scientific director of the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility from 1999 to 2011.

He holds professorships at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he is the James McConnell Distinguished Professor of Physics, and at Warsaw University. He received his doctorate in physics from Warsaw’s Institute for Nuclear Research.

Sumpter leads both the Computational Chemistry and Materials Science group in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division and the Nanomaterials Theory Institute at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. He has demonstrated international leadership across a broad spectrum of materials theory including electronic structure, molecular dynamics, and soft materials. He has been exceptionally productive at the confluence of theory and experiment, working across organizational boundaries to provide theory and modeling leadership across disciplines.

Sumpter received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Southwestern Oklahoma State University and his doctorate in physical chemistry from Oklahoma State University. He has published more than 300 papers with 6,000 citations.

Since joining ORNL’s Environmental Sciences Division in 1990 as an Alexander Hollaender Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow, Wullschleger has performed pioneering research in climate change, the genetic basis for bioenergy crops, carbon-water cycles, and molecular ecology.

He is the national project director for DOE’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE) Arctic, a research initiative to address the coupled physical, chemical, and biological behavior of permafrost-rich terrestrial ecosystems on the North Slope of Alaska. He has published 144 peer-reviewed articles with 8,500 citations and has organized six international conferences and given more than 200 invited talks. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated exceptional breadth and depth in his science, has been an effective science communicator, and has been a valued collaborator and mentor to early career staff.

Wullschleger received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Colorado State University and earned his doctorate in crop physiology from the University of Arkansas.

ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit http://science.energy.gov.