The awards will be presented at the Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) meeting in San Diego. The FLC is composed of 711 federal laboratories and facilities representing approximately 100,000 scientists and engineers. The awards recognize federal laboratory employees who have accomplished outstanding work in the process of transferring a technology to the commercial marketplace.
"These outstanding scientific achievements by ORNL's staff not only benefit the nation's economy through creation of marketable products, but they also represent the world-class scientific research that is contributing to the nation's security," said Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham.
The Excellence In Technology Transfer awards are for robust wireless technologies for extreme environment communications, thin-film rechargeable lithium batteries, microcantilevered-based biosensors and lab-on-a-chip.
"These awards are a tribute to the work of many dedicated researchers at ORNL whose contributions are paving the way for a bright future in the areas of science and technology," said ORNL Director Jeff Wadsworth.
Robust wireless technologies for extreme-environment communications allows for the deployment of highly reliable, low-power communications devices to operate in harsh physical and atmospheric environments.
ORNL researchers recognized for this work are Stephen Smith, Gregory Hanson, Michael Moore, John Jones Jr., Roberto Lenardduzzi, Michael Emery, Gary Turner, Nance Ericson, Timothy McKnight, James Hylton, James Moore, Alan Wintenberg, William Dress, Paul Ewing and Grady Vanderhoofven. Thin-film rechargeable lithium batteries are less than 10 micrometers thick and when fully integrated with a device have energy and power densities surpassing other battery technologies. They can be recycled thousands of times and can be fabricated on a variety of substrates and devices in arbitrary shapes and to any size to meet specific application requirements.
ORNL researchers working on the project are Nancy Dudney and Ashok Choudhury.
Microcantilever-based biosensors can be used in the diagnosis of disease, cancer and cardiac markers, high throughput drug screening and exposure to chemical and bio-warfare agents.
Researchers from ORNL working on this project are Thomas Thundat, Zhiyu (Jerry) Hu and Russ Miller.
The lab-on a-chip is a microfabricated device that performs chemical and biochemical procedures under computer control, using miniscule quantities of samples to be analyzed.
Researchers working on this technology are Michael Ramsey, Stephen Jacobson, Roswitha Ramsey, Ashok Choudhury and Michael R. Knapp.
ORNL earned five awards from the Southeastern FLC last fall. That organization is composed of 40 federal laboratories in a nine-state region of the Southeastern United States.
ORNL is a multiprogram science and technology laboratory managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy.