Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Neutron Sciences Directorate, or NScD, home organization for the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor, has filled two high-level administrative positions with leaders in the neutron scattering field.
Rob McQueeney, recently with Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory, has been named NScD’s deputy associate laboratory director. Alan Tennant, currently with the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin in Germany, has been named chief scientist for the NScD.
“We welcome Rob and Alan to the ORNL neutron science family and look forward to the expertise and ideas they will contribute to the ongoing establishment of ORNL as the world’s premier laboratory for neutron scattering research,” said Associate Laboratory Director for Neutron Sciences Kelly Beierschmitt.
Intense beams of neutrons produced by the SNS and HFIR are ideally suited to the study of the atomic and molecular structure of advanced materials related to biology, chemistry, physics, and engineering. The two facilities’ broad range of analytical instruments attracts visiting researchers from academia and industry worldwide.
McQueeney most recently worked as a professor of physics and astronomy at Iowa State University and as a senior physicist at Ames Laboratory. He also worked at the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
In 2011, he was selected for an assignment at the U.S. Department of Energy Scientific User Facilities Division in the X-ray and Neutron Scattering Facilities Program. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has published more than 100 papers using both neutron and x-ray scattering techniques to explore novel magnetic materials, such as high-temperature superconductors.
McQueeney, who begins at ORNL on Oct. 1, will support Beierschmitt in developing and directing the scientific user programs and instrument and neutron source operational programs at the Spallation Neutron Source and the High Flux Isotope Reactor, two of the world’s leading facilities for neutron scattering analysis of materials.
Tennant, who has served as speaker of the magnetism division and of the user platform at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, recently was among six researchers who shared the Europhysics Prize, Europe’s leading recognition for condensed matter physics, for work at the Berlin research reactor BER II.
Tennant was also the Keeley-Rutherford Research Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford University, and at Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory in the United Kingdom, and taught condensed matter physics at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He was a postdoctoral student at ORNL from 1996 to 1998, during which he won the lab’s technical achievement award.
He will report to Beierschmitt and begins at ORNL in November.
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