November 1, 2010 — Amit Goyal, a researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named by R&D Magazine as the leading technology publication's Innovator of the Year.
Goyal, who currently chairs the UT-Battelle-ORNL Corporate Fellows Council, is a Battelle Distinguished Inventor whose pioneering research has had a profound impact on the field of high-temperature superconductivity, both in fundamental materials science and in the transition of scientific discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace.
He has won a total of five R&D 100 awards, which the magazine selects in an annual competition, including two just this year: High-Performance, High-Tc Superconducting Wires Enabled via Self-assembly of Non-superconducting Columnar Defects and Flexible, Large-area, Single Crystal-Like, Semiconductor Substrates. The R&D 100 Awards, widely recognized as the "Oscars of Innovation," are given to the top 100 technologies or products of the year.
Goyal's technical contributions have been in the area of large-area, low-cost, high performance "flexible electronic" devices, including superconductor-based and semiconductor-based devices, in 3-D self-assembly of nanodots of complex materials within another complex material for device applications, and in controlled synthesis of 1-D and 3-D nanoarrays for applications
Goyal has co-authored more than 300 publications, published over 40 invited papers and book chapters, and has given more than 150 invited presentations in national and international conferences including plenary or keynote presentations. He has more than 50 issued patents and over 20 patent applications pending. He has written or co-edited five books on high-temperature superconductors and one book on epitaxial growth of advanced functional materials.
A recent Thompson-Reuters's Essential Science Indicators analysis of citations and papers published worldwide in the last decade in the field of high-temperature superconductivity ranks him as the most cited author worldwide.
His innovations have provided elegant solutions to achieving essentially single-crystal-like behavior in long lengths of superconducting material, using techniques that are industrially scalable and cost effective as well as in creating self-assembled, nanoscale defects within superconductors that dramatically enhance their properties. He is widely regarded as an international leader in the fields of high-temperature superconducting materials, texture development in materials and electron backscatter diffraction.
Goyal joined ORNL as a postdoctoral fellow in 1991 after completing his doctorate at the University of Rochester. He earned a bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and received executive business training from Purdue University and the Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His awards include the Distinguished Scholar Medal from the University of Rochester, Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review Magazine's TR-100 Innovator Award, NASA Techbrief's Nano50 Innovator Award, Pride of India Award, ORNL Inventor of Year (twice), Global Indus Technovator Award, and Battelle Distinguished Inventor. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the ASM International, the American Ceramic Society, the World Technology Network, the World Innovation Foundation (UK) and the Institute of Physics (UK).
Originally from India, Goyal lives in Knoxville with his wife, Sujata, and their two children, Adtiya and Divya.
ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy's Office of Science.