Larry Allard, a distinguished research staff member at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named a Fellow of the Microanalysis Society. Bestowed annually, the distinction recognizes eminent scientists, engineers and technologists in the field of microanalysis of materials and related phenomena. Allard is one of only three fellows chosen for the 2022 class.
The society recognized Allard’s “outstanding leadership and sustained contributions to development of electron microscopy of materials.” Fellows were honored at the society’s annual meeting in August.
At ORNL, Allard is a member of the Nuclear Energy Materials Microanalysis group in the Materials Science and Technology Division. He leads research in advanced microscopy for in situ materials characterization. He pioneered electron microscopy methods for in situ heating and gas-reaction studies, utilizing one of the nation’s first commercial aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscopes that enables the highest resolution of a material’s atomic structure.
He has demonstrated atomic resolution at high temperatures with this instrument, and his accomplishments have had broad impacts on applications ranging from materials for automotive alloys to a variety of catalytic and other nanophase materials. He also led the technical design of ORNL’s Advanced Microscopy Laboratory, which houses the lab’s state-of-the-art electron microscopy instrumentation.
Allard was first employed in Oak Ridge as a development engineer in 1970 at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant after receiving a master’s degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Michigan. He returned to Michigan for his doctorate in materials engineering, and subsequently worked in industry studying catalysts at the American Cyanamid Company’s Stamford Research Laboratory. He returned to Oak Ridge in 1986 for a senior position as one of the first staff members to inaugurate the High Temperature Materials Laboratory.
Allard has co-authored more than 350 scientific publications that have been cited more than 22,000 times. He is a fellow of the Microanalysis Society and the Microscopy Society of America.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. – Ashley Huff and Dawn Levy
