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He is well known for his expertise in the field of lithium batteries at Argonne National Laboratory. Since graduating with a doctorate in metallurgical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he has been with the lab with his early research on safe storage of nuclear waste arising from efforts to recycle spent nuclear fuel (nuclear technology). Since joining the Energy Storage team in 2001, he led the effort to identify performance degradation mechanisms in lithium-ion cells and develop new chemistries that enhance cell performance, life, and safety. His interests range from the discovery and development of electrode and electrolyte materials for sustainable and environmentally friendly batteries to recycling existing lithium-ion cells to recover non-renewable components. He has authored more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals spanning various frontier areas of lithium battery research, including crystal structure transformations in layered oxides, silicon electrode development, solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) formation/dissolution mechanisms, evolution of stress in electrodes during cycling, influence of electrode/particle coatings on cell performance, electrolyte additives development, and electrochemical modeling. He has delivered more than 250 technical presentations in popular, academic, and industrial settings, including more than 90 invited, keynote, and plenary lectures. More importantly, he is a research advisor and mentor to various undergraduate and graduate students and postdoctoral associates. He was awarded the 2015 Pinnacle of Education Award by the University of Chicago for “exceptional work in the supervision of postdoctoral employees and in developing the next generation of scientists and engineers.”

Aaron Balsmeier

Idaho National Laboratory

Area of Expertise

Decontamination

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Mr. Balsmeier has over 15 years of experience in the nuclear industry including reactor core manufacturing, design engineering, project engineering/management, and nuclear construction. He is currently the Nuclear Remote Systems Department Manager at the Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC). Mr. Balsmeier began his career in 2003 as an Officer in the United States Navy. Mr. Balsmeier was assigned as an engineer at Naval Reactor Headquarters, NAVSEA 08, supporting reactor core manufacturing and development. After his Naval service, Mr. Balsmeier started as a project and design engineer for the Advanced Test Reactor (ATR) at Idaho National Laboratory (INL) in 2008. He focused on plant modifications to support experiments while at ATR. Mr. Balsmeier joined Westinghouse Electric Company in 2011 as a project support engineer for construction of the lead AP1000 plant, Sanmen 1 in Zhejiang, China. While at Sanmen, he focused on reactor plant piping installation and construction of the containment vessel and shield building. In 2014, Mr Balsmeier returned to INL working as an engineer at MFC. While at MFC, he participated in numerous modifications of the Hot Fuels Examination Facility, facility modifications and buildout of research capabilities in the Irradiated Materials Characterization Laboratory, and most recently as an engineering manager. Mr. Balsmeier holds a BS degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Kansas and a MS in Engineering Science from the Naval Postgraduate School. Mr. Balsmeier is a licensed Professional Engineer.

Robert O'Brien

Idaho National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

Other Modeling and Simulation

Discovery Research

Diagnostics

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Dr. Robert O’Brien is an internationally recognized Principal Nuclear Scientist/Engineer who has focused his career on the development of advanced materials and energy systems in addition to the manufacturing processes to produce materials for harsh environments Dr. O’Brien received a PhD in the nuclear engineering and physics of radioisotope and nuclear power / propulsion systems for space exploration from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom. Under his PhD research project, Dr. O’Brien proposed the use of americium-based radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) and developed Spark Plasma Sintering (SPS) Electric Field Assisted Sintering Techniques (EFAST) for the encapsulation of nuclear materials for both RTGs and nuclear reactor fuels. Dr. O’Brien also received a Masters degree in Physics with Space Science and technology from the University of Leicester. Dr. O’Brien’s research and programmatic management experience in advanced manufacturing of harsh environment materials, space systems and instrumentation design/development, defense systems, nuclear fuel performance, nuclear instrumentation, nuclear safety, irradiation testing, radioisotope source design, and nuclear power system design and development.

Dr. O’Brien currently serves as the Director of Advanced Manufacturing for the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory (INL). Under this role, Dr O’Brien’s leadership extends across all of the Directorates of the laboratory; Energy & Environment Science & Technology, Nuclear Science & Technology, National & Homeland Security, Materials & Fuels Complex, Advanced Test Reactor, and Industry Engagement.

Charles Catlett

Argonne National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

IoT

Sensors and Detectors

Machine Learning

High-performance Computing

Sensors

Power Systems and Grid Modernization

Artificial Intelligence

Social Consequences

Population Dynamics

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Charlie is Senior Computer Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and the founding director of the Urban Center for Computation and Data (UrbanCCD), a joint Argonne-UChicago research center that brings scientists, artists, architects, technologists, and policy makers together to use computation, data analytics, and embedded system to understand the dynamics, design, and resilient operation of cities. He is also a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before joining Argonne in 2000, Charlie served as Chief Technology Officer of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Beginning at NCSA’s founding in 1985, he participated in the development of NSFNET, one of several early national networks that evolved into what we now experience as the Internet. During the exponential growth of the web following the release of NCSA’s Mosaic web browser, his team developed and supported NCSA’s scalable web server infrastructure. Chicago’s “Tech 50” technology leaders.

Charles T. Black

Brookhaven National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

Capacitors

Thin Films

Nanomaterials

Superconductors

Coating Materials

Semiconductors/PV

Membranes

Materials Characterization

Solar

Sensors

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His research program explores the use of nanostructured material architectures for solar energy conversion. From 1996 to 2006, he was a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York investigating using polymer self-assembly for fabrication of high-performance semiconductor electronics. During his career, he has also performed experimental research in low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, single-electron tunneling devices, superconductivity in metal nanoparticles, nanocrystal-based electronic devices, and ferroelectric non-volatile memories. He earned his doctorate in physics from Harvard University and bachelor’s in physics and mathematics from Vanderbilt University. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a member of the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society, and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Ralph Muehleisen

Argonne National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

Systems Design

Building Materials

Building Construction

Windows

Electric Grid

Building Technologies

Power Systems and Grid Modernization

Population Dynamics

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Dr. Ralph T. Muehleisen is the Principal Building Scientist, the Building Energy Decision and Technology Research (BEDTR) Group leader, and the Urban Science and Engineering Program lead for Argonne’s Energy Systems division. At Argonne, Dr. Muehleisen leads research to increase the energy efficiency and resiliency of the built environment while improving the quality of life and return on investment for citizens. His projects include urban science and engineering, stochastic building energy modeling, reduced order building energy modeling, risk analysis of building energy retrofits, Bayesian Calibration methods for building energy models, agent based models for understanding adoption of retrofit technologies, smart building/smart grid integration, and the development of new energy efficient and diagnostic technologies buildings. Dr. Muehleisen is the author of over 180publications and presentations, and is a frequent invited speaker in the areas of urban science and engineering, building energy modeling, architectural acoustics and noise control.

Charles Macal

Argonne National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

Other Modeling and Simulation

Other Modeling and Simulation Agent based Modeling

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Biography

Charles Macal applies computational modeling and simulation tools to complex systems to solve problems in a variety of fields, including energy and national security.

He is the chief scientist for the Argonne Resilient Infrastructure Initiative, and is a principal investigator for the development of the widely used Repast agent-based modeling toolkit.

He has Appointments at the University of Chicago Computation Institute and the Northwestern-Argonne Institute for Science and Engineering. He is adjunct professor at the University of Chicago, where he teaches a course on Complex Adaptive Systems for Threat Management and Emergency Preparedness.

He is a registered professional engineer in the State of Illinois and holds software copyrights for two systems: ELIST (Enhanced Logistics Intra-theater Support Tool) and EMCAS (Electricity Market Complex Adaptive System).

Education

B.S. Purdue University, 1974
M.S., Purdue University, 1975
Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1989

Awards, Honors and Memberships

Association for Computing Machinery, Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation, Area Editor for Agent-based Modeling
Society for Computer Simulation International, Simulation Journal, Associate Editor

Nancy Lybeck

Idaho National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

Nuclear

Diagnostics

Materials Characterization

Modeling

Advanced Materials

Data Management

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She is the manager of the Department of Human Factors, Controls, and Statistics at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). She graduated from Montana State University with a doctorate in mathematics with an emphasis in numerical analysis, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in industrial mathematics at the Center for Research in Scientific Computation at North Carolina State University. Prior to joining INL in 2010, she worked for Sentient Corporation and served as a principal investigator for several Small Business Innovation Research projects in the area of prognostic health management. She has extensive experience in data processing and analysis using the SAS programming environment and MATLAB, and served as the technical lead for the Nuclear Data Management and Analysis System from 2014 to 2017. She has also provided analytical support as needed for a variety of projects at INL, including high-temperature materials characterization and fuel performance.

Colby Jensen

Idaho National Laboratory

Areas of Expertise

Nuclear Fuel Performance

Thermodynamics

Thermoelectric Power

Optics

Computational Fluid Dynamics

Instrumentation

Modeling

Materials Characterization

Simulation

Energy Conversion

Solar

Sensors

Advanced Materials

Energy Storage

Nuclear Fuel Safety Research

Nuclear

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He is a research and development engineer in the Experiment Analysis Group of Nuclear Science and Technology at Idaho National Laboratory. In his present position, he leads in-pile instrumentation development for transient irradiation testing and is a principal investigator for transient testing of metallic fuels. He is an experiment safety and performance analyst for experiments at the Advanced Test Reactor and the Transient Reactor Test Facility. In addition, he is a technical lead for measurement of thermophysical properties of nuclear materials. He has expertise in energy transport in condensed matter, liquids, gases, and material interfaces. He has significant experience in advanced measurements of thermophysical properties of nuclear materials using multi-scaled approaches, including nano-scale measurements using atomic force microscopy, laser-based microscopic photothermal methods, and bench-scale high temperature thermal conductivity techniques. He also has expertise in numerical and commercial finite element analysis. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Utah State University and a joint doctorate from Utah State University and Universite de Reims Champagne-Ardenne. He is a member of American Nuclear Society (ANS) and American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was the founding president of the ANS Student Chapter at Utah State University and currently serves as an Executive Committee member for the Material Science and Technology Division of ANS.

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