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Feature Story | Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne names Distinguished Fellows for 2014

ARGONNE, Ill. – The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has named scientists U. (Balu) Balachandran, Michael Borland, Yousry Gohar and Paul Messina as Distinguished Fellows, the laboratory’s highest scientific and engineering rank.

The Argonne Distinguished Fellow title is comparable in stature to an endowed chair at a top-ranked university and recognizes exceptional contributions in a person’s field. The rank is given for sustained outstanding scientific and engineering research and can also be associated with outstanding technical leadership of major, complex, high-priority projects.

U. (Balu) Balachandran’s research interests include advanced capacitors for power electronics in electric drive vehicles; membranes for gas separation; methods for upgrading natural gas; methods for ethylene, oxygen, and hydrogen production; fuel cells; and high-temperature superconductors.

U. (Balu) Balachandran

U. (Balu) Balachandran received his B.E. (1975) and M.E. (1977) degrees in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Madras and Indian Institute of Science (Bangalore, India), respectively, and Ph.D. degree (1980) in Materials Science from the Oregon Graduate Institute, OR. After two years of post-doctoral work, he joined the research staff in the R&D Division at Raychem Corp., Menlo Park, CA.  He subsequently joined the Materials and Components Technology Division of Argonne National Laboratory in 1987.  He is a Fellow of the American Ceramic Society (1999), a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (2006), and currently, Senior Scientist and Manager of the Ceramics Section within the Energy Systems Division at Argonne.

His research interests include advanced capacitors for power electronics in electric drive vehicles; membranes for gas separation; methods for upgrading natural gas; methods for ethylene, oxygen, and hydrogen production; fuel cells; and high-temperature superconductors. He has authored/coauthored 270 papers in peer-reviewed international journals, edited 21 books (conference proceedings/transactions), and holds 35 patents. He has won four R&D 100 Awards, two Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Awards for Excellence in Technology Transfer, the Distinguished Alumni Award from the National Institute of Technology (India), and the University of Chicago’s Distinguished Performance Award. He has been on the editorial boards of Superconductor Science & Technology (2001–2009), Journal of Materials Transactions: The Japan Institute of Metals (2000–present), and Journal of Materials Physics and Mechanics (2001–present). 

Michael Borland’s best-known work, an accelerator simulation code named ELEGANT,” provides physicists world-wide with a flexible tool to design and understand linear accelerators and storage rings. ELEGANT is the primary tool at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source for accelerator design and simulation. Photo credit: Mark Lopez, Argonne National Laboratory.

Michael Borland

Michael Borland, Associate Division Director of the Argonne Accelerator Systems Division in the Photon Sciences Directorate, received a B.S. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1985 and a Ph. D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1991. In 2013, Borland received the Asian Committee on Future Accelerators IPAC13 Prize for Accelerator Science, for a recent, significant contribution to the accelerator field. This was in recognition of his leadership in developing the program ELEGANT and the SDDS Toolkit, as well as his discovery of the coherent synchrotron radiation microbunching instability in magnetic bunch compressors. Also in 2013, he shared the APS Compton award in recognition of his role in the implementation of top-up mode at APS. In 2007, Borland received a University of Chicago Distinguished Performance Award for his work on software for accelerator research and he also was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.   In 1996, he was co-recipient of a University of Chicago Distinguished Performance Award for his role in the design and commissioning of the APS accelerator complex.

Borland, who has been with the APS since 1991, began his work in accelerator-related software nearly 30 years ago. His best-known work, named ELEGANT,” is an accelerator simulation code that provides physicists world-wide with a flexible tool to design and understand linear accelerators and storage rings. ELEGANT, the primary tool at the APS for accelerator design and simulation, was used to develop the present APS storage ring low-emittance lattice (the configuration of magnet strengths) and played an essential role in the development of top-up mode at the APS. ELEGANT is also used to design and understand free electron lasers, including the world’s first hard x-ray FEL, the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC.

For over a decade, Borland has led efforts to develop upgrade options for the APS, including energy recovery linacs and ultra-bright storage rings.  In the process, he played a leading role in the application of direct, multi-objective genetic methods to the design of storage ring lattices. Presently, he leads the beam physics effort for the APS Upgrade, which centers on the development of an ultra-low emittance lattice that promises to make APS the brightest storage-ring source of hard x-rays in the world.

Yousry Gohar’s research includes the development and design of fusion and fission reactor components, design and analysis of nuclear systems, accelerator driven systems, nuclear technology development, and nuclear engineering computational methods. Photo credit: Mark Lopez, Argonne National Laboratory.

Yousry Gohar

Yousry Gohar is a senior nuclear engineer, section manager in the Nuclear Engineering Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and deputy technical director for research and development of the Russian Research Reactor Fuel Return Program of the Department of Energy.  He received his B.S. 1967, M.S. 1970, and Ph.D. 1974 in Nuclear Engineering from Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University, Egypt.

His research includes the development and design of fusion and fission reactor components, design and analysis of nuclear systems, accelerator driven systems, nuclear technology development, and nuclear engineering computational methods.  He has coordinated design activities and nuclear technology developments in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Russia.  Dr. Gohar had researched and lectured at the Atomic Energy Establishment of Egypt, Alexandria University of Egypt, Cairo University of Egypt, American University in Cairo, and University of Wisconsin in Madison.  In 1977, he joined Argonne National Laboratory, where he has held various national and international technical and coordinating positions.  From 1992 to 1998, he represented the US DOE at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) Joint Central Team in Garching (Germany), where he was the group leader responsible for the first wall/blanket/shield design and R&D.  At present, he is responsible for design and construction of several accelerator driven experimental facilities for DOE in Belarus and Ukraine. He has served as a chairman and member of different national and international workshops and technical committees.  Dr. Gohar was honored for his research work and leadership by receiving several awards including the Secretary of Energy’s Achievement Awards in 2014 and 2009.  He published more than 375 articles in scientific journals and technical reports.

Paul Messina’s work has been instrumental in government planning to develop an exascale system to identify the potential scientific and national security benefits of these next-generation systems His work also involves training the next generation of supercomputer users. Photo credit: Mark Lopez, Argonne National Laboratory.

Paul Messina

Paul Messina received his B.A. in mathematics, College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, 1965, M.S. in applied mathematics, University of Cincinnati, 1967, a Ph.D. in mathematics, University of Cincinnati, 1972, and an Ph.D. (honorary) in computer engineering, University of Lecce, Italy, 1997.  He is an applied mathematician and computer scientist who first joined Argonne’s Applied Mathematics Division in 1973 to manage the Argonne Subroutine Library and to found and lead the User Services Group. In 1982, he served as founding director of Argonne’s Mathematics and Computer Science Division, a position he held until 1987. In 1983, Paul and his colleagues Jack Dongarra, Danny Sorensen, and Rusty Lusk established the parallel computing program at Argonne – nearly 10 years before computational science was broadly recognized and federally funded as a new paradigm for scientific investigation. Paul worked at Caltech from 1987-2002 and rejoined Argonne in 2002 as a Senior Computer Scientist. Since 2008, Paul has served as the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF’s) Director of Science, where he helps attract top scientists to the ALCF user community.

At the ALCF, Paul has been instrumental in the government’s planning efforts to develop an exascale system, organizing workshops on behalf of the DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research to identify the potential scientific and national security benefits of these next-generation systems, as well as the technical challenges that must be met. Since 2013, Paul has run the Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing, a two-week intensive training course aimed at preparing the next generation of supercomputer users.

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