Thomas Zacharia

Deputy Director for Science and Technology

Dr. Zacharia oversees one of the nation’s largest research and development programs, with annual expenditures of $1.3 billion in materials and physical
sciences, energy and engineering sciences, computing and computational sciences, life and environmental sciences, neutron sciences, and national security. Prior to his present appointment, he served as Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences from 2001 to 2009. In this capacity, he organized and built a computing directorate with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Defense (DOD). In 2004, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham awarded the National Leadership Computing Facility to a world-class team led by Zacharia, to “Deliver major research breakthroughs, significant technological innovations, medical and health advances, enhanced economic competitiveness, and improved quality of life for the American
people”. Dr. Zacharia has done a remarkable job of building ORNL’s computational program into one of the world’s best. He is a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. As professor and PI, Zacharia successfully led the proposal to establish the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) through a $65M grant from the NSF, the largest award
by the NSF to the State of Tennessee.

Dr. Zacharia joined the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1987 as a postdoctoral researcher in the Metals and Ceramics Division. He founded the Materials Modeling and Simulation Group and served as group leader until 1998, when he became the division director of the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. From 2000-2001, he was Deputy Associate Laboratory Director for High Performance Computing, and then was named Associate Laboratory Director for the newly formed Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate. Dr. Zacharia holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Regional Technical College in Karnataka, India, an M.S. in materials science from the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi, and a Ph.D. in engineering science from Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York. He holds two U.S. patents and is author or co-author of more than 100 publications on high-performance computing for manufacturing processes.

Dr. Zacharia is a Fellow of the American Welding Society. He is the recipient of several scientific and technical awards, including the A. F. Davis Silver Medal Award and two William Spraragen Awards from the American Welding Society; the Champion H. Mathewson Co-Author Citation Award from the American Society for Metals; and three ORNL Technical Achievement Awards. He is also the recipient of a number of leadership awards, including the 2001 ORNL Leader of the Year Award. Zacharia serves as a member of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Science Advisory Board, the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, the NSF’s Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, and the High Performance Computing Advisory Board of the Council on Competitiveness. He also serves on the advisory board of the Forschungszentrum Jülich, the research center at Julich, in Germany, and is a member of the High End Computing steering committee of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, in the United Kingdom.