Two scientists and an Innovation Crossroads alumna affiliated with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory were recognized by DOE’s Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office, or AMMTO, last month for their contributions in manufacturing innovation for the nation’s energy sector.
The awardees are:

Santa Jansone-Popova, an organic chemist at ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division, who received AMMTO’s Innovation Award.
The award recognizes Jansone-Popova’s role as three-time co-chair of a special symposium, “Innovations in Rare Earths and Critical Minerals,” at the annual TechConnect World Innovation Conference and Expo. TechConnect World joins top applied researchers and early-stage innovators from universities, labs and startups with industry end users and scouts.
The third symposium that Jansone-Popova co-organized will take place this summer in Austin, Texas.
Jansone-Popova joined ORNL’s Chemical Separations group in the Chemical Sciences Division in 2014. Her research interests include synthesis of structurally complex and diverse organic compounds for applications in nuclear science, rare earth recovery and ion-conducting polymer research. In 2016, she received the Young Investigator Fuel Cycle R&D Excellence Award.

Bill Peter, program manager for advanced manufacturing at ORNL, who received AMMTO’s Visionary Award.
Peter currently manages a research portfolio of more than 90 projects. He was one of the founding creators of the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, or MDF, and served as its director for six years.
Under Peter’s direction, the MDF generated more than $1 billion in follow-on private funding for its partners based on manufacturing and materials research and developed more than a dozen new manufacturing systems. Peter has collaborated with hundreds of companies to help transfer MDF innovation to the marketplace to benefit the nation’s industrial competitiveness.
He has been named in eight R&D 100 Awards and developed two technologies that received Federal Laboratory Consortium technology transfer awards. In 2020, Peter was elected as a fellow of SME.

Megan O’Connor, a 2018 fellow of ORNL’s Innovation Crossroads, who received AMMTO’s Commercialization Award.
O’Connor is co-founder and CEO of Nth Cycle, a metal refining company working with scrap recyclers, manufacturers and miners to recover production-grade critical metals from industrial scrap, low-grade ore and refining waste.
The company uses a patented electro-extraction technology that enables customizable, clean and consistent recovery of the critical metals for energy transition. The technology is designed to reduce the cost, footprint and environmental impact of producing recycled metals that have the same composition and performance as newly mined minerals, with one-tenth the energy input.
O’Connor led the company to commercialization in six years.
After completing ORNL’s Innovation Crossroads program — a two-year, lab-embedded program for fellows focusing on energy and advanced manufacturing technologies — O’Connor was named to the energy list for Forbes 30 Under 30. She was also named to the 2022 Grist50 list which identifies emerging leaders in climate, equity and sustainability. Most recently, TIME named O’Connor as one of its 100 Most Influential Climate Leaders in Business for 2024.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit https://energy.gov/science. — Tina Johnson
