Featured Speaker

Dr. Lee Riedinger

Dr. Lee Riedinger is a professor of physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, on the faculty since 1971 after receiving a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1968. His research at present is focused on experiments to search for the occurrence of tetrahedral nuclear shapes and includes experiments at the ATLAS accelerator at Argonne National Laboratory using beams of heavy nuclear projectiles and the Gammasphere array of gamma-ray detectors. Dr. Riedinger has authored 200 refereed publications and has given 60 invited talks at conferences and workshops; in addition, he is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). His research has been funded by the Department of Energy since 1976, and various sabbatical leaves have been spent at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark. From 1983–84, Dr. Riedinger was the science advisor to Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who was then the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. He has received the UT Chancellor’s Research Scholar Award (1983), the Francis G. Slack Award from the Southeastern Section of the APS (2005), the Macebearer award at the University of Tennessee (2009), and fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2011). In addition to teaching and research, he has served in a number of administrative leadership positions at the university: 1988–91, director of the UT Science Alliance Center of Excellence; 1991–95, UT Associate Vice Chancellor for Research; 1996–2000, head of the Physics Department; 2006–2007, Vice Chancellor for Research. From 1993 to 1996, he was the first chair of the Tennessee Science and Technology Advisory Council, which advised the Governor and the Legislature on technical priorities for the state. From 2004 to 2006, he served as the ORNL Associate Laboratory Director for University Partnerships, to extend the capabilities of the laboratory through joint programs with universities, including joint faculty hires and joint institutes. Since his return to the university in 2006, he has led various efforts to bring a greater focus on energy at UT. In the vice chancellor position, he led an Energy Working Group to map future directions in energy-related research and education, and helped to initiate a center devoted to sustainable energy. In September of 2010 he was appointed as the first director of the UT/ORNL Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education (CIRE), which is the academic home of a new doctoral program in energy science and engineering. In addition to being director of CIRE, in January 2012 he accepted the position as Interim Vice Chancellor for Research.