Argonne engineer earns alumni award from Cornell University

Argonne Senior Engineer Roger Poeppel recently received the 2008 Materials Science and Engineering Distinguished Alumni Award from Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.

A three-member faculty committee selected Poeppel based on his service as the former head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory programs in Ceramics and as director of the lab’s former Energy Technology Division.

A total of four alumni were recognized in the inaugural year of acknowledging the significant contributions and achievements of Cornell graduates to the field of materials science and engineering.

Poeppel is a 1964 graduate of Cornell, where he earned a Bachelor of Engineering Physics and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1968. He has been with Argonne for 39 years and is a senior engineer in the Environmental Science Division, where he is responsible for new nuclear reactor licensing projects.

Along with his work in ceramics and the Energy Technology Division, Poeppel has been an invited speaker at numerous meetings and conferences and has initiated collaborative research with at least 25 private companies. As director of the Argonne National Laboratory Pilot Center, he was responsible for developing collaborative research with industry and university partners to improve properties of ceramic superconductors and to assure rapid commercialization of this new technology.

He has more than 200 published works and 20 patents and was the editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Superconductivity.

Argonne National Laboratory brings the world’s brightest scientists and engineers together to find exciting and creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America ’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.