Researchers at Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory named ORNL Corporate Fellows

Three researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been named ORNL Corporate Fellows in recognition of significant career accomplishments and continued leadership in their scientific fields.

Ilias Belharouak, Grace Burke and Phil Snyder represent ORNL’s strengths in battery technology, materials science and fusion energy research. The Corporate Fellow designation recognizes standing in the scientific community as an exceptional and influential researcher and as a role model and mentor among peers and early career researchers.

“Each day, ORNL has an opportunity to serve the nation, bring economic prosperity to our community, protect our fellow citizens and deliver a clean energy future,” ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia said. “Ilias, Grace and Phil have been instrumental in ensuring we deliver on those critical national missions, and they are truly worthy of this illustrious recognition.”

Ilias Belharouak is a distinguished scientist and leads the Electrification section in ORNL’s Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division.

Belharouak has extensive experience working with private and public sector partners on the advancement of battery and energy storage technologies. His research interests involve high-power and high-energy lithium-ion batteries and technology beyond lithium-ion batteries; battery materials and molecular discovery and design; electrolytes and additives; engineering and scale-up of battery components and cells; multi-scale range characterization of battery components and interfaces; and diagnostics, postmortem and probing of the aging phenomena in batteries.

He holds 50 patents and patent applications, has received six R&D 100 Awards, and serves as editor of the Journal of Power Sources. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in materials science and solid-state chemistry from the University of Bordeaux in France.

Grace Burke is a distinguished R&D staff member in ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division.

Burke is an industry-recognized scientific leader in the fields of advanced microstructural characterization, irradiation embrittlement and the technology of materials for nuclear power applications. Her research interests focus on environment-sensitive behavior of materials, irradiation damage, phase transformations, precipitation and segregation. She has extensive experience in the application of advanced characterization techniques such as analytical electron microscopy, atom probe field-ion microscopy and quantitative microanalysis to structure-properties investigations in a wide variety of power generation and technologically important materials.

She is a fellow of ASM International; the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society; the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining; the Microscopy Society of America; the MicroAnalysis Society; and the Royal Microscopical Society, of which she currently serves as president. She is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester and an adjunct professor at The Ohio State University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Pittsburgh and a doctorate in metallurgy from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London.

Phil Snyder leads the Burning Plasma Foundations section in ORNL’s Fusion Energy Division.

Snyder’s research has focused on electromagnetic plasma turbulence and on the stability and dynamics of the edge region of magnetic fusion plasmas, particularly the physics of the edge transport barrier, or “pedestal,” and edge localized modes. He developed a predictive model of the pedestal, which has been coupled with models of the core plasma to predict and optimize performance of existing and future fusion devices.

He has engaged in numerous fusion community planning activities including serving as a member of the National Academies Committees on a Strategic Plan for U.S. Burning Plasma Research and Key Goals and Innovations Needed for a U.S. Pilot Plant. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and has been honored with the IAEA Nuclear Fusion Award, the APS John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research and the Rosenbluth Award for Fusion Theory. He received his bachelor’s degree in the computational physics program at Yale University and a doctorate in plasma physics from Princeton University.