Rich Davies recently joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as deputy director of the Sustainable Transportation Program. Having previously worked in vehicle and manufacturing research, program management, and strategic planning at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), he comes to ORNL with a strong understanding of the role national labs can play in shaping the future of transportation.
A father of three who enjoys cycling on the greenways, Davies took some time to share his thoughts on how transportation is changing and what drew him to Oak Ridge.
Tell us a bit about your professional background. What were you working on before you came to ORNL?
I spent the early part of my career in R&D program management and working as a principal investigator on research. I focused on leading and growing partnerships, mainly with the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and material suppliers. That’s where I learned to conduct research, write proposals, and run larger projects to satisfy sponsors. For about five years, I was the relationship manager at PNNL for the industrial technology program that would later become the DOE Advanced Manufacturing Office. I also had some leadership roles in the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office materials program.
The second part of my career had two emphases: international and strategic. Internationally, I led a portfolio of collaborative research and development projects for the National Nuclear Security Administration. While I was doing that, I was also the director of the strategic planning organization at PNNL.
I spent the last nine years working with the laboratory director at PNNL to transform the way we managed the lab and to make it a more effective organization. Designing how an R&D organization works from end-to-end is an experience I think most scientists have never been through.
What spurred you to return to program management?
I had stepped out of research at the request of the laboratory director to help improve lab operations, and I felt like I had achieved that goal. We had taken PNNL to eight consecutive years as the top performing laboratory, and the key measures I was tracking—things like scientists’ job satisfaction— had increased and plateaued. I was ready to come back to program management, research, and development, and I wanted to join a strong program. The place I belong, from a technical home room and the leadership in charge of it both aligned, so for me it was time to make the move.
What excites you about working at ORNL?
Oak Ridge has a very extensive, very capable set of people working here. If there is anything that excites me, it is working with people who are at the forefront of their area in the world. And there are not one or two of them. There are hundreds of them working on innovative projects across this program and within the National Transportation Research Center.
The Manufacturing Demonstration Facility is a great opportunity. Manufacturing will have to be able to produce what the cars of the future are—whether it be telematics, connected, sensors, or lightweight materials. You cannot truly capitalize on everything you can do with transportation in this country if you don’t revolutionize manufacturing with it, and I see that here in a synergistic way that I don’t see anywhere else.
What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities in transportation?
After probably 75 years of us knowing what a car is and how it works, we are starting to become uncertain about that again. You have this change of architecture that hasn’t happened for three or four generations in cars, and that takes a lot of the old thinking and throws it out the window. When the automotive industry started up heavily in the ‘20s and ‘30s, two of the casualties of that entire startup were buggy whip manufacturers and horse farms. We are almost at the same level of transformation where you’re going to put down one set of technologies and pick up a new set of technologies, and some things are going to become obsolete.
The entire paradigm of travel is getting challenged. For example, we still haven’t fully embraced what drone technology can do for us. We’re still rolling on roads, floating on water, rolling on rails. If we get drones that can be automated and they start to get payloads, that changes transportation. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but soon, we’ll reach a point where you can pull up an app like Uber and have a small unmanned hovercraft come pick you up. The confluence of all of these technologies is going to change the architecture of transportation, and I think that changed architecture is the biggest challenge, because you don’t know which of these is going to take over the world. It is also the greatest opportunity, because it is no longer just about critiquing whether a stamping process for an automotive alloy can get thinner. That was very comfortable to be working on: evolutionary, how-do-I-make-the-standard-architecture-better solutions. That standard architecture is going to go out the window, and if you don’t embrace whatever is next, you are going to get left behind.
What is your favorite vehicle?
If I had to pick a vehicle, it would be the F22 fighter jet. They are radar invisible at Mach 2.5 at 37,000 feet carrying 27,000 lbs. of ordinance. If you find anything cooler than that, let me know. I have historically done a lot of collaboration with Boeing, and I got to work on some of these parts over time. You feel a little closer to the vehicle when you know the material set and you know the engineers who are doing the materials, design, and manufacturing.
What is the role of the Sustainable Transportation Program?
I have a simple philosophy about a program. There are really three things you must do. One of them is you better deliver on what you’ve promised. As you are fulfilling those promises, you generally develop evolutionary and important new areas to work on. If you are at a national laboratory, you also need to provide thought leadership to move in a new direction. This is where I think ORNL can really contribute, and I look forward to working with the team here as well as our partners in government, industry, and academia to navigate and shape the shifting paradigm in transportation.
