Lab Partnering Service Discovery

Manager, Systems Assessments

Biography

Michael Wang is an Argonne National Laboratory Distinguished Fellow, Senior Scientist, and Director of the Systems Assessment Center of the Energy Systems division. He has been with Argonne since 1993. Dr. Wang’s research areas include:

• Evaluation of energy and environmental impacts of vehicle technologies, transportation fuels, and energy systems 
• Assessment of the market potentials of new vehicle and fuel technologies
• Examination of transportation development trends in emerging economies

Michael Wang has led the development and applications of Argonne’s GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Technologies) model for life-cycle analysis of advanced vehicle technologies, transportation fuels, and other energy systems. His work in the life-cycle analysis area has been used by government agencies and industries and cited extensively in research and academic fields. As of 2019, there are more than 40,000 registered GREET users worldwide. Dr. Wang has worked closely with governmental agencies, automotive companies, energy companies, universities, research institutions, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the United States, China, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and Europe to address energy and environmental issues related to the transportation sector and energy systems.

Jointly, Dr. Wang is a faculty associate in the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and a senior fellow in the Northwestern Argonne Institute of Science and Engineering of Northwestern University. He is a guest professor in China’s Shanghai Jiaotong University. He is an associate editor of Biotechnology for Biofuels and on the editorial boards of Automotive Innovation, Frontiers of Energy and Power Engineering in China, and Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Changes. He has more than 270 publications.

Blake Simmons serves as the Chief Scientific and Technology Officer and Vice President of the Deconstruction Division at the US Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) in Emeryville. After earning his BS in chemical engineering from the University of Washington, Dr. Simmons continued his studies at Tulane University and received his doctorate in the same field. Dr. Simmons worked as part of the Senior Management team at Sandia National Laboratories for 15 years, most recently serving as the Senior Manager of Advanced Biomanufacturing as well as the Biomass Program Manager. He joined Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in February of 2016 as the Division Director of Biological Systems and Engineering. He is an Adjunct Professor at the University California-Berkeley and the University of Queensland in Australia. His expertise includes advanced biofuels, renewable chemicals, biomanufacturing, ionic liquids, abiotic-biotic interfaces, biomass pretreatment, enzyme engineering, biofuel cells, templated nanomaterials, microfluidics, desalination, and biomineralization.

Group Leader - Nanofabrication and Devices/Materials Scientist, Nanoscience

Biography

Current research interests include superlubricity, nucleation and growth mechanisms of CVD-diamond, graphene and CNT, micro- and nanoscale tribology, electronic and mechanical properties of carbon-based materials. Special interest in field emission, and fabrication of energy efficient MEMS/NEMS devices.

Education 

Ph.D., University of Pune, India

Awards and Honors: 

• TEDx Speaker
• 2018 National Innovation Award from Techconnect on Portable Ultrananocrystalline Diamond based Field Emission Electron Sources for Linear Accelerators
• Pacesetter Award, Argonne National Laboratory, 2018
• Top 100 finalist Chicago Innovation Award 2017
• Pinnacle of Education Award from Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory for teaching youth nanotechnology and developing Next Gen STEM Kit
• 2017 National Innovation Award from TechConnect on developing wafer-scale method to grow single and multilayer graphene on dielectric substrate in 1 min
• 2016 National Innovation Award from TechConnect on developing graphene-nanodiamond based solution to achieve superlubricity

Corinne Scown is interested in better understanding the interaction between complex, interdependent infrastructure systems and the environment, particularly in the realm of energy and water. Ongoing projects include life-cycle modeling of cellulosic ethanol production scale-up in the United States, framework development for sustainable co-management of water and energy, and uncertainty quantification in life-cycle assessment of emerging technologies.

Areas of expertise: biofuel technoeconomics, water-energy co-management, life-cycle modeling of emerging technologies, waste-to-energy systems

Dr. John D. Siirola is a Principal R&D Member of Technical Staff in the Discrete Math and Optimization Department within the Center for Computing Research at Sandia National Laboratories. His main areas of expertise are systems design, operations research, optimization modeling, and optimization algorithms. John’s research focuses on the intersection of computational tools with systems design and analysis; in particular, developing approaches for modeling highly structured systems, and optimization algorithms that can exploit the expressed structure.

Much of John’s research is disseminated through open-source software projects. He is the Sandia PI for the Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (process modeling, design, and optimization) and serves on the Pyomo Management Committee (optimization modeling). Previously he led the Acro project (optimization algorithms) and contributed to the Water Security Toolkit (modeling and analysis tools for drinking water distribution systems), Dakota (optimization and uncertainty quantification), Utilib, PyUtilib, gcovr, and cxxtest.

John has a B.S. from Purdue University (2000) and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (2005), both in Chemical Engineering. He is a senior member of the AIChE, member of INFORMS, and member of the COIN-OR Foundation. John currently serves on the COIN-OR Technical Leadership Council and co-chaired the 2014 Foundations of Computer Aided Process Design (FOCAPD) conference.