Honor recognizes contributions over 60-year career
The Neutron Scattering Society of America (NSSA) has awarded the 2026 Clifford G. Shull Prize to Takeshi Egami, a UT-ORNL distinguished scientist and professor at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Created in memory of the Nobel-Prize winning physicist, the Shull Prize recognizes outstanding research in neutron science and leadership promoting the North American neutron scattering community. NSSA specifically recognized Egami for “outstanding contributions to the use of neutrons to study local correlations in materials with disorder, the development of novel methods to use neutrons for this purpose, and the mentorship of the next generation of scientists.”
Egami holds a joint appointment as a UT-ORNL Distinguished Scientist in ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division and in UT’s Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Physics and Astronomy.
“This is a great honor for Takeshi and well-deserved,” said Yutai Kato, director of the Materials Science and Technology Division at ORNL. “His scientific achievements are worthy in and of themselves, but his influence on generations of aspiring researchers has greatly enhanced his scientific impact.”
Egami began his 60-year science career with studies at the University of Tokyo, where he received his bachelor's degree in applied physics before earning his doctorate in materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Following a long tenure as a professor at Penn, he joined ORNL in 2003, becoming the founding director of what is now called the Shull Wollan Center — a Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences.
Egami has won multiple awards, authored one book and written over 550 technical papers. He is a fellow of NSSA, the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
–Greg Cunningham
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’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 energy.gov/science.
