Oak Ridge Deputy Director and member of the National Academy of Engineering Ramamoorthy Ramesh has been named as Berkeley Lab’s Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Technologies. The newly created ALD position has laboratory-wide responsibility for accelerating the translation of basic and applied research results into real world energy applications. With leadership from Ramesh, Berkeley Lab will pursue a strategic vision for driving technology innovation from first discovery to first commercial use.
Ramesh’s research experience and capabilities are very familiar to the scientific staff at Berkeley Lab, to the broad national lab community, and to the Department of Energy. During his tenure at Berkeley Lab, where he has served as a Faculty Scientist and Faculty Senior Scientist within the Materials Sciences Division, Ramesh collaborated on several high-profile research collaborations that have resulted in numerous publications. In 2011 he served as Director of the SunShot Initiative through the U.S. Department of Energy. In June of 2013, Ramesh joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory as Deputy Lab Director for Science and Technology.
In his new position, Ramesh will lead the lab’s development of energy technologies, with a stewardship role for the Environmental Energy Technologies Division and related lab-wide activities, to ensure the attainment of the lab’s multidisciplinary long-term and short-term research, development, and deployment goals for sustainable energy technology.
Ramesh graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a Ph.D. in Materials Science in 1987. He returned to Berkeley in 2004, and was the Plato Malozemoff Chair in Materials Science and Physics 2009-2012. Prior to that, he was a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland College Park.
From 1989-1995, Ramesh worked for Bellcore (Bell Communications Research) where he initiated research in several key areas of oxide electronics, including ferroelectric nonvolatile memories. In 1994, in collaboration with S. Jin (Lucent Technologies), he initiated research into manganite thin films and helped coin the term, Colossal Magnetoresistive (CMR) Oxides. His current research interests include thermoelectric and photovoltaic energy conversion in complex oxide heterostructures.
Ramesh has published extensively on the synthesis and materials physics of complex oxide materials and received the Humboldt Senior Scientist Prize and Fellowship to the American Physical Society (2001). In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as the David Adler Lectureship of the American Physical Society. In 2007, he was awarded the Materials Research Society David Turnbull Lectureship Award and, in 2009, was elected Fellow of MRS and is the recipient of the 2010 APS McGroddy New Materials Prize. In addition, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2011.
Ramesh’s in-depth technical expertise combined with his established leadership experience will be an immediate benefit for the Lab.