ORNL Director and UT-Battelle Chief Executive Officer Bill Madia announced the appointments, which are made on a limited basis to recognize "exceptionally gifted individuals throughout the organization for their outstanding technical achievements in science or engineering." The appointments of Dale, Geist and Haire bring the number of active corporate fellows to 27.
Dale was honored for pioneering the development and application of ecological models for understanding disturbance and its effect on ecosystems and applications for decision making. Her citation reads, in part, "She has shaped the field of applied ecology. Her work has influenced the land management of some of the largest landholders in the world. In addition, she has worked with the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program of the Department of Defense to develop ecological models and ecosystem indicators to assist in land management."
Dale joined ORNL's Environmental Sciences Division in 1984. She also is an adjunct professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee.
Dale has held several management positions at ORNL. She was program manager for the DOE's land-use research, a task leader for ORNL Director's R&D fund on land-use changes, group leader of the Theoretical Ecology Group and a team leader at the National Center for Environmental Decision-Making Research at the University of Tennessee. She also has served as associate director and acting director of the laboratory's Environmental Sciences Division.
Before coming to ORNL, Dale taught ecology and biology at the University of Puget Sound and was an assistant professor at Pacific Lutheran University.
Dale, who grew up in Nashville, received a bachelor of arts degree and a master of science in mathematics from the University of Tennessee. She received her doctorate of mathematical ecology from the University of Washington. Dale recently completed service as chair of the U.S. Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology. She serves on the Science Advisory Committee of the U.S. Department of Interior Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center. She has held several positions in the Ecological Society of America, participated in several activities of the National Academy of Sciences and is active in the Association of Women in Science. She has won numerous awards and has published more than 140 articles and edited three books.
Geist was honored for "his extraordinary contributions in the critical field of high performance computing and his fundamental breakthrough research in the field of high performance distributed/cluster computing." His citation notes his significant contributions to a number of research areas and his worldwide recognition for the development of PVM (Parallel Virtual Machine, which permits a cluster of computers to be used as a single parallel computer) and participation in the design of the Message Passing Interface standard.
Geist joined ORNL in 1983. He has been a group leader in the Engineering Physics and Mathematics and Computer Science and Mathematics divisions and was involved in the formation of the Center for .
Computational Sciences. He has served as section leader of the High Performance Research Systems and is leader of the Network Cluster Computing Group.
He received a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics and psychology from Duke University and a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University. Geist is a principal participant in the DOE SciDAC program and leads a national effort to develop scalable systems software needed by the world's terascale computer centers. He also is the principal investigator on the DOE Science Grid proposal that will deploy grid technologies across the DOE complex and on the Scientific Annotation Middleware proposal to develop electronic notebooks and their support technologies. He has received numerous awards, including an R&D 100 Award, the Gordon Bell Prize and two Energy 100 awards. He has published more than 175 articles and one book.
Haire was recognized for his forefront, fundamental studies of actinide elements through element 101 but has concentrated on the transplutonium elements produced in the ORNL High Flux Isotope Reactor. He developed novel experimental techniques and emphasized the use of systematic comparisons, which have focused on the role of electronic configurations in the chemistry and physics of these elements. His citation notes that his pioneering research is recognized internationally and has led to numerous collaborations.
Haire joined ORNL in 1966 and continues to serve as leader of the Transuranium Chemistry Group. During his employment at ORNL he has been a visiting scientist at several other research laboratories, both domestic and international. He also has served as a full adjunct professor of chemistry at the University of Tennessee. He is a member of several scientific organizations, is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was a recipient of the International Researcher Award in Japan. His actinide research has resulted in more than 325 publications.
Haire received a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the University of Illinois and his doctorate in chemistry from Michigan State University. He has resided in Oak Ridge since joining ORNL.