Five ORNL scientists rated among world’s most influential

Five Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicists, including Deputy for Science and Technology Ramamoorthy Ramesh, have been named by Thomson Reuters as some of the best and brightest of our time.

The list consists of scientists whose work has been most frequently cited by peers as identified by Thomson Reuters platforms. Citation data was divided into two categories—2002-2012 and 2012-2013—with the latter labeled “hot papers,” ranking in the top 0.1 percent by citations in their field. Seventeen researchers earned this distinction while some 3,200 were included in the second section of the ranking with citations ranking in the top 1 percent for their field and year of publication.

Ramesh, who was actually listed in two categories—physics and materials science—was named to his position at ORNL in June 2013 after serving as the Plato Malozemoff Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, with a joint appointment as a faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He holds a doctorate in materials science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011 in recognition of his contributions to the science and technology of functional complex oxide materials.

Joining Ramesh as the world’s most influential scientific minds of 2014 are Michael McGuire, Brian Sales, Athena Safa-Sefat, and David Singh. While McGuire and Sefat are relatively early in their careers, Ramesh, Sales, and Singh are established leaders.

McGuire earned a doctorate in physics from Cornell University and is a former Eugene Wigner Fellow (2007-2009). His work focuses on solid-state chemistry and metallurgical synthesis techniques, crystallographic studies, and physical property measurements to explore structure-property relationships in complex materials. His honors include two Significant Event awards, the Gordon Battelle Prize in 2011, and the Directors Award for Outstanding Team Accomplishments in 2009. He has more than 130 scientific publications.

Sales has more than 30 years’ experience with the synthesis and characterization of unusual electronic and magnetic materials, particularly those involving rare-earth materials. He is an inventor of the year, the recipient of an R&D 100 Award and in 2007 was named ORNL Distinguished Scientist of the Year. He is the author of more than 300 papers, holds six patents and his work has been cited more than 13,000 times. Sales earned a doctorate in solid-state physics from the University of California, San Diego.

Sefat holds a doctorate in solid-state chemistry from McMaster University and was a postdoctoral fellow in condensed matter physics at Ames Laboratory. She is a former Eugene Wigner Fellow (2007-2009) and has received a number of awards, including DOE’s Early Career Award in 2010, ORNL’s Science & Technology Early Career Award for Scientific Accomplishment (2010), and the Gordon Battelle Award for Group Scientific Discovery in 2011. She has more than 150 publications.

Singh earned a doctorate in physics from the University of Ottawa, Canada, and is an ORNL corporate fellow. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a 2011 winner of the Gordon Battelle Prize, and has 439 scientific publications with 28,500 citations. Singh is also a recipient of the E.O. Hulburt Annual Science Award and a two-time winner of ORNL Directors Awards.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The 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, visit http://science.energy.gov/. More information about Thomson Reuters is available at http://thomsonreuters.com.