News Releases

• ORNL, Los Alamos pioneer new approach to assist scientists, farmers
• ORNL, partners helping scientists deal with data deluge
• UT's Kraken Named World's Third Most Powerful Computer, ORNL's Jaguar No. 1
• NSF Dedicates Athena Supercomputer to Climate Research
•   Video News Coverage
•   RSS News Feed
•   Podcast of Audio News

ORNL Review

• Of Scale and Science
• Now, The Science
• Where None Have Gone Before
• Cross Pollination
• Imitating Mother Nature

Elias Greenbaum

Chemical Sciences Division

For basic energy research in photosynthesis and its application to the production of renewable fuels and chemicals.

Elias Greenbaum is a Corporate Fellow and leader of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Molecular Bioscience & Biotechnology Research Group.  He is also an adjunct professor in the University of Tennessee’s Genome Science and Technology program.  He received B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Brooklyn College and Columbia University.  Greenbaum’s main area of research is in the field of photosynthesis and materials science and their applications to artificial sight, nanoscale science and technology, biosensor development, and renewable hydrogen production.  He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  In 2000 he was named Oak Ridge National Laboratory Scientist-of-the-Year and received the 1995 Department of Energy’s Biological and Chemical Technologies Research Program Award. He received several UT-Battelle and Lockheed Martin Energy Research Corporation awards.

Greenbaum led the team that won a 2005 Federal Laboratory Consortium Award of Excellence in Technology Transfer for “AquaSentinel Real-Time Water Supply Protection Monitoring Biosensor System,” an algal biosensor technology approach to protection of source waters from chemical attacks.  He holds 13 patents and is the author of more than 100 publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals.  In collaboration with Prof. Mark Humayun of the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine he founded DOE’s artificial sight program which is aimed at restoration of sight to people who are blind from age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.  Greenbaum is editor-in-chief of the Springer-American Institute of Physics Biological and Medical Physics/Biomedical Engineering Series and served as associate editor of the Biophysical Journal.  He served as a member of the publications committees of the Biophysical Society and the American Institute of Physics as well as advisory panels and review committees for the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation.  Greenbaum was a Watkins Visiting Professor at Wichita State University and a Norman Hascoe Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.  He currently serves on the National Research Council’s Biomolecular Materials and Research Processes Committee and is leader of the subcommittee on Biomolecular and Bioinspired Energy Tranducers.