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January 26, 2021 | Tom Ballard

DOE announces senior positions including Director of Office of Technology Transitions

The U.S. Department of Energy announced 19 senior-level appointees last week. All are important to the region, but one we took special note of because of our tenure in career #2 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was Vanessa Chan.

Vanessa Z. Chan will serve as Director of the Office of Technology Transitions, referred to in the news release as the Chief Commercialization Officer. She comes to the Biden-Harris Administration from the University of Pennsylvania where Chan was the Brassington Professor of Practice and the Undergraduate Chair of the Materials Science and Engineering Department.

According to the announcement, she has spent the past 20 years helping large companies commercialize their technologies and revamping the academic curriculum of engineering students to make a greater social impact. Chan earned her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

With so much emphasis being placed on better leveraging of ORNL assets, she could also be important in implementation of the recommendations outlined in the Techstars assessment of the local innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem.


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