April 18, 2024
Staff Accomplishment

Three from PNNL Named AAAS Fellows

Kirsten Hofmockel, Grant Johnson, and Sergei Kalinin attain prestigious status

Kirsten Hofmockel, Grant Johnson, and Sergei Kalinin.

From left: Kirsten Hofmockel, Grant Johnson, and Sergei Kalinin.

(Composite image by Shannon Colson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)

Three Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)-affiliated researchers have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society.

This latest class is comprised of 502 scientists, engineers, and innovators across 24 AAAS disciplinary Sections. The newly elected Fellows overwhelmingly represent the fields of biological sciences, chemistry, medical sciences, and engineering followed by neuroscience and physics. View the 2023 AAAS Fellows class.

The new Fellows from PNNL:

Kirsten Hofmockel

Kirsten Hofmockel is a chief biological scientist. Her research focuses on understanding soil ecosystems and aims to discover microbial solutions to environmental problems, including climate change. As principal investigator for the Department of Energy (DOE)-funded Soil Microbiome Science Focus Area project, Hofmockel identifies molecular reactions that inform the prediction of ecosystem responses to environmental change and probable feedbacks to ecosystem functions.

Grant Johnson

Grant Johnson is a chemist and team lead for Chemical Physics and Separations. He leads the Basic Energy Sciences (BES)-funded Separation Science program, which is focused on developing a fundamental understanding of structure-function relationships to support the design and synthesis of tailored materials for improved separations. He also serves as Chief Scientist for PNNL’s Non-Equilibrium Transport Driven Separations (NETS) Initiative. Johnson has research interests in atomically precise nanomaterials and clusters for energy storage, catalysis, and quantum information systems.

Sergei Kalinin

Sergei Kalinin is the Weston Fulton Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and a joint appointee with PNNL.

From 2022 to 2023, he was a principal scientist for an Amazon.com, Inc., special project. Previously, he worked 20 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory where he was a corporate fellow and group leader at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. His research focuses on the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence methods in materials synthesis, discovery, and optimization.