2021 Ceremony and Lectures

The virtual awards ceremony honoring the 2021 SC Distinguished Scientist Fellows was held on Wednesday, October 20, 2021. Proceedings included a brief awards ceremony presentation followed by a roundtable Q&A with the 2021 Distinguished Fellows. Fellows shared stories about their contributions to science, professional experiences, career trajectories, and working at the DOE National Laboratories.

Watch the ceremony proceeding here. View the ceremony program here.

The Distinguished Scientist Fellows award, authorized by the America COMPETES Act, is bestowed on DOE National Laboratory scientists with outstanding records of achievement and provides each Fellow with $1 million over three years to support activities that develop, sustain, and promote scientific and academic excellence in DOE Office of Science research.

The 2021 DOE Office of Science Distinguished Scientist Fellows are:

Gregory W. Hammett, Ph.D.
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

For leading the development of the quantitative theory and simulation of plasma turbulence in fusion and astrophysics, and for educating and mentoring a diverse group of graduate students and early career researchers .

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Jay Keasling, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

For national scientific leadership in synthetic biology that has advanced DOE’s strategy in renewable energy, especially the realization of biofuels and bioproducts that enable biomanufacturing at scale, and inspire and grow the U.S. bioeconomy.

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Biographies (2021):

Gregory W. Hammett, Ph.D.
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

Dr. Greg Hammett is a Principal Research Physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), a US Department of Energy National Laboratory. He is also a Lecturer with Rank of Professor in the Princeton University Program in Plasma Physics, and is part of the associated faculty of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1997. A child of the Apollo moon landing era, he got interested in physics through his father, a US Air Force fighter pilot, and through Star Trek reruns and popular science books. He graduated from Baldwin County High School in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1976, in the middle of the first energy crisis, and at that time got interested in fusion energy. He graduated from Harvard in 1980, finished his Ph.D. in plasma physics from Princeton in 1986, and has worked at PPPL since, though assignments included the European JET tokamak, Imperial College London, Berkeley, and Oxford. PPPL does research in plasma physics and fusion energy, which has the potential to be an attractive new energy source. Dr. Hammett specializes in computational and theoretical studies of the complex physics of plasma turbulence. He and collaborators are working on supercomputer simulations of 5-dimensional gyrokinetic plasma turbulence in fusion devices, and are studying methods to reduce turbulent heat losses, which could lead to a more economical fusion power plant. Most recently, they have been working on a code using novel versions of Discontinuous Galerkin algorithms for the challenging edge region of tokamaks. His work on fluid models of Landau-damping (which extends fluid equations to low collisionality where traditional closure approximations break down) has been cited in over 400 papers, finding application to diverse fields such as MHD turbulence in astrophysical plasmas, plasma processing of semiconductors, laser-plasma interactions, and his own specialty of fusion devices. He has done some astrophysics, such as kinetic effects on magnetorotational instability turbulence in accretion disks around black holes. He has supervised 12 Ph.D. students, and thanks his students and colleagues for the many things he has learned from them.

Jay Keasling, Ph.D.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Jay Keasling is a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Philomathia Distinguished Professor of Alternative Energy at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Bioengineering and the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Chief Executive Officer of the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). Dr. Keasling’s research focuses on metabolic engineering of microorganisms for environmentally friendly synthesis of drugs, chemicals, and fuels. Keasling received a B.S. in Chemistry and Biology from the University of Nebraska and M.S. and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan and did post-doctoral research in biochemistry at Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Keasling has published over 500 papers in peer-reviewed journals, has over 65 issued patents, and has won numerous awards. Keasling is the founder of Amyris, LS9, Lygos, Napigen, Demetrix, Maple Bio, Apertor Pharma, and Zero Acre Farms.

L. Ruby Leung, PhD.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

L. Ruby Leung is a Battelle Fellow at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Her research broadly cuts across multiple areas in modeling and analysis of climate and water cycle including orographic precipitation, monsoon climate, extreme events, land surface processes, land-atmosphere interactions, and aerosol-cloud interactions.

Ruby is the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM), a major effort to develop state-of-the-art capabilities for modeling human-Earth system processes on DOE’s next generation high performance computers. She is also the principal investigator of the DOE Water Cycle and Climate Extreme Modeling (WACCEM) science focus area that is pioneering research in understanding and modeling variability and changes in precipitation and hydroclimatic extremes in a warming climate.

She has organized many workshops sponsored by Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration to define gaps and priorities for climate research. Ruby is a member of the Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate (BASC), National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and an editor of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Journal of Hydrometeorology and American Geophysical Union (AGU) Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. She is also a council member of AMS and a board member of Washington State Academy of Sciences.

Ruby is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and Washington State Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the AMS, AGU, and American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She is the recipient of the 2019 AGU Global Environmental Change Bert Bolin Award and Lecture and the 2020 AGU Atmospheric Science Jacob Bjerknes Lecture. She has been selected for the 2022 AMS Hydrologic Sciences Medal for her “ingenious, groundbreaking contributions which enhance the modeling of land-atmosphere interactions and the hydroclimate.” Ruby has published over 375 papers in peer reviewed journals. She received a BS in Physics and Statistics from Chinese University of Hong Kong and an MS and PhD in Atmospheric Sciences from Texas A&M University.