ORNL honored with five awards from the Federal Laboratory Consortium
Kyle Gluesenkamp, Senior Research Scientist in the Buildings and Transportation Science Division, was recognized with the "Outstanding Researcher Award." Others honored tech transfer efforts.
Researchers, staff members, and licensees from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) received top honors in the Federal Laboratory Consortium’s annual awards competition for excellence in technology transfer, excellence in technology transfer innovation, outstanding researcher, and regional technology transfer. Of the 32 award winners recently announced, ORNL-related individuals or programs received five citations.
- Kyle Gluesenkamp, Senior Research Scientist in the Buildings and Transportation Science Division, was recognized with the “Outstanding Researcher Award” for the role he plays in managing a portfolio of thermal energy storage technologies and advanced equipment for buildings, such as heat pumps, water heaters, and residential appliances. As ORNL’s Subprogram Manager for Thermal Energy Storage, Gluesenkamp bridges gaps between science and industry by collaborating with manufacturers and other stakeholders to develop products that can reduce energy consumption and peak demand to enable a decarbonized energy future.
- ORNL received two Excellence in Technology Transfer Awards.” One was for the Heartbeat and Situ technologies that offer new methods for advanced cybersecurity monitoring in real time. The Heartbeat system collects power trace measurements directly from computer hardware, is invisible to malware and is resilient to internet service disruption. Situ combines anomaly detection and data visualization to provide a distributed, scalable streaming platform for discovering and explaining suspicious behavior. The licensed technology portfolio includes five patents and two registered copyrights. The other was for a negative-emissions direct air capture technology that has the potential to significantly impact the global ability to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It was licensed by Holocene, a Knoxville-based start-up co-founded by Anca Timofte.
- The Safe Impact Resistant Electrolyte (SAFIRE) is the world’s only patented and proprietary drop-in additive for lithium-ion batteries that prevents fire and explosion through an instantaneous liquid-to-solid transformation upon kinetic impacts, such as ballistic events or electric vehicle crashes. It was recognized for a “Regional Technology Transfer Award,” and the technology is licensed to Safire Technology Group which has a lab at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Spark Innovation Center and continues to work closely with ORNL via a strategic partnership project.
- Finally, ORNL’s Partnerships Directorate won a “Technology Transfer Excellence Award” for its Technology Transfer Researcher Liaison initiative. To increase researcher engagement in technology transfer, ORNL led a team of 11 Department of Energy national laboratories in launching the program that, over a two-year period, resulted in an 8 percent average increase in the number of invention disclosures and a 12 percent increase in first-time inventors reporting inventions.
The full news release, including the individuals cited, can be found here.
