Bio
Dave Willis is a senior mechanical design engineer who supports the Linear Accelerator and the Beam Test Facility at SNS. He designs new equipment as well as improvements to existing equipment, creates drawings for fabrication, and often coordinates installation of the components or equipment. Mr. Willis studied mechanical engineering at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and graduated cum laude in 1989. Mr. Willis then started his career at Idaho National Laboratory (previously Idaho National Engineering Laboratory) and worked on a variety of projects for five years, then took a position in the Robotics and Remote Systems group, where he worked for six years. His work was primarily in the area of nuclear decontamination and decommissioning. He developed or helped develop several remotely operated systems, including a pipe crawler that operated in two to three inch pipe, a duct crawler that operated in ventilation ducts, an underwater ROV that characterized immersed nuclear reactors, and a remotely operated dual arm work platform that was used to dismantle the CP-5 reactor at Argonne National Lab. In 2000 he and his family moved to Knoxville, Tennessee and he found a job at Agile Engineering, a small engineering company that was just getting started. Initially he developed tooling to support the cutting of scintillating crystals, but moved into things like robotic end effectors to build crystal arrays. As the company grew he started designing more complex equipment, including imaging gantries for companies like Siemens for doing nuclear imaging of small animals. After eight years the company had grown and he became the engineering manager at what was now Agile Technologies, managing several engineers and technicians while still doing machine design. Mr. Willis left Agile in 2015 and took a job with AECOM, designing several process glovebox systems for the Uranium Processing Facility that was going to be built at Y-12. That project ended in 2018 and Mr. Willis took a job as a Senior Mechanical Engineer at Navus Automation where he designed a variety of mechanical systems including all the supporting equipment for a large die cast line at Denso and a transfer system for doing robotic machining of very large steel blocks. In 2019 Mr. Willis took his current position at ORNL.
Mr. Willis has three U.S. patents from his work at Idaho National Lab, and has written multiple papers and presented them at conferences around the U.S. He and his wife Maureen have three children and nine grandchildren and live in a lovely 1920's farmhouse with their two dogs, 3 cats, four ferrets, honeybees, and varying numbers of chickens and ducks.