Ceremony and Lecture Series

Mary Raafat Mikhail Bishai, Ph.D.
Brookhaven National Laboratory
Honored for enduring contributions at the intensity frontier of high energy physics in unraveling fundamental properties of neutrinos, extraordinary leadership and service to the particle physics community, and deep commitment to broadening participation through mentoring next generation scientists.

Lecture: January 14, 2025, from 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. ET
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Lois Curfman McInnes, Ph.D.
Argonne National Laboratory
Honored for exceptional accomplishments in innovative algorithms and software, leadership in major projects, including SciDAC and ECP, and in promotion of scientific productivity and software sustainability, and for outstanding efforts to broaden participation in high-performance computing and related science and engineering.

Lecture: February 10, 2025, from 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. ET
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Kristin Persson, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
A recording of the lecture held on October 17, 2024, is available online.
Photos from the event will be made available online soon.
Honored for pioneering advancements in data-driven materials design and discovery through first-principles based computations and analysis algorithms that yield materials with optimal properties for engineers and scientists worldwide to accelerate innovation, and for her management and outreach skills that promote DOE’s missions.

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Gerald A. Tuskan, Ph.D.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Honored for foundational scientific advances in the development of resilient bioenergy feedstock crops, for excellence in leading large, multi-institutional science teams toward a robust, sustainable bioeconomy, and for supporting the next generation of diverse scientists.

Lecture: November 19, 2024, from 1:30 – 3:00 p.m. ET
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Biographies

Mary Raafat Mikhail Bishai, Ph.D.

Experimental Particle Physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory

Dr. Mary Bishai is currently an experimental particle physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. She received her Ph.D. in High Energy Physics from Purdue University in 1999 and a BA from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1991. Dr. Bishai's research is in the field of high energy and particle physics with a particular emphasis on the physics of neutrinos and heavy quarks. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Bishai served as the Project Scientist for the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) which lead to the formation of the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) in 2015. DUNE is a leading-edge, international experiment for neutrino science and proton decay studies currently under construction in the US. In 2023, Dr. Bishai was elected co-Spokesperson of the DUNE international scientific collaboration representing over 1400 researchers from 36 countries and over 200 institutions. Dr. Bishai has been a scientific collaborator on many leading particle physics experiments including the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS), the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF II), and the CLEO experiment. Dr. Bishai is co-author of over 400 publications and played a leading role in several of the most highly cited publications in the last two decades including the publication on the production of charmonium and b-quarks at CDF II which has garnered over 1000 citations and the observation of muon neutrino disappearance from the NuMI beamline (900+ citations). Dr. Bishai was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014 for her contributions to neutrino science and understanding of the b-quark and received the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as a member of the Daya Bay collaboration.

Dr. Bishai is committed to the development of a diverse and inclusive scientific workforce. She has mentored over 15 undergraduate interns through the DOE SULI program as well as 6 high school student interns through BNL OEP HSRP program. She is an active member and supporter of the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications and has mentored several ASP alumni who have been accepted into Ph.D programs in the US and Europe.

Lois Curfman McInnes, Ph.D.

Senior Computational Scientist and Argonne Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory

Lois Curfman McInnes is a senior computational scientist and Argonne distinguished fellow in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Her work focuses on high-performance computational science, with emphasis on scalable numerical libraries and community collaboration toward productive and sustainable software ecosystems. Lois served as Deputy Director of Software Technology for the U.S. DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) during 2020-2023 and leader of the ECP Broadening Participation Initiative, a partnership across DOE labs initiated in 2021 to help address urgent workforce challenges in high-performance scientific computing. During 2014-2023, Lois also co-led the IDEAS productivity project, focused on improving software productivity and sustainability as a key aspect of advancing scientific productivity. Outreach initiatives launched by the IDEAS team include the Better Scientific Software site (https://bssw.io) —a community-curated hub for sharing information about scientific software development—and the Better Scientific Software (BSSw) Fellowship Program (https://bssw.io/fellowship), which gives recognition and funding to leaders and advocates of high-quality scientific software. Lois and collaborators in the PESO project and newly established Consortium for the Advancement of Scientific Software (CASS) are working to steward and advance the scientific software ecosystem, as needed to address next-generation challenges in mission-driven team science. Lois earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Virginia and a B.S. in mathematics and physics (Summa cum Laude) from Muhlenberg College. Lois’s early work focused on developing scalable nonlinear solvers in the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc, https://petsc.org), which provides the foundation of a wide variety of high-performance scientific applications. She received the 2015 SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science & Engineering and a 2009 R&D 100 Award, as part of the core PETSc development group, as well as the E.O. Lawrence Award in 2011 for outstanding contributions in R&D supporting DOE and its missions. Lois is a member of ACM, IEEE, and SIAM and a SIAM Fellow. She served on the SIAM Council during 2018-2023 and during 2022-2023 chaired the SIAM Activity Group on Supercomputing, which launched the Supercomputing Spotlights webinar series, featuring short presentations that highlight the impact and successes of high-performance computing throughout our world.

Kristin Persson, Ph.D.

Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor at University of California, Berkeley

Dr. Kristin Persson is the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. From 2020 to 2024, she served as the Director of the Molecular Foundry, one of the five U.S. DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers. In 2011 she founded the Materials Project (materialsproject.org) which has emerged as one of the most visible materials data repositories originating from the Materials Genome initiative (MGI). She has served as the Director of the Project since its inception and today, the Materials Project serves millions of materials data records every day to more than half a million registered users worldwide. In 2021 the Materials Project was recognized by DOE as an official Public, Reusable Research (PuRe) Data resource for materials data and design. Persson has received the DOE Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Award (twice), the TMS Cyril Stanley Smith Award, the TMS Faculty Early Career Award, the Falling Walls Science and Innovation Management Award, and the LBNL Director’s award for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Physical Society (APS). She holds several patents in the clean energy sector and has been among the world's top 1% most cited researchers since 2020. She has co-authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications.

Gerald A. Tuskan, PhD

Director and Chief Executive Officer, Center for Bioenergy Innovation, and Corporate Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Gerald Tuskan is the Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Center for Bioenergy Innovation at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a 17-institution effort focused on accelerating the domestication of bioenergy-relevant plants and microbes to enable high-impact innovation across the sustainable aviation fuel supply chain. His research over the past 25 years has focused on advancing domestication of the bioenergy feedstock Populus through genomic selection approaches and genetic manipulation of targeted genes and gene families, with a focus on cell wall biosynthesis. Through team-based science, he has advanced the discovery of novel genes and gene systems controlling biomass traits applicable to DOE missions. Dr. Tuskan led the team that sequenced the first-ever tree genome, Populus trichocarpa, and is a leading authority on plant genomics. He has inspired or co-led advancement of many other bioenergy crop species, including willow, switchgrass, silver maple, sweetgum, and sorghum. Recently, his interests have expanded to include terpene production from coppiced eucalyptus. Dr. Tuskan is an ORNL Corporate Fellow, a Battelle Distinguished Inventor, and winner of an R&D 100 award for the TNT Cloning System. He has published more than 315 peer-reviewed articles that have been cited more than 38,250 times, and he has been listed among Clarivate Analytics’ most highly cited authors four times in the past five years, with an h-index of 89. Dr. Tuskan was previously Group Leader of the Plant Systems Biology group at ORNL, co-lead for the Plant Genomics Program at the DOE Joint Genome Institute, and co-lead/principal investigator for the DOE Plant–Microbe Interactions Scientific Focus Area. He holds 18 patents and excels at technology transfer, with three technologies licensed by industry. He obtained a doctorate in genetics at Texas A&M, a master’s degree in forest genetics from Mississippi State University, and a bachelor’s degree in forest management from Northern Arizona University.