Dr. William Tumas —

Biography

 Bill Tumas is responsible for overall leadership, management, technical direction, and workforce development of the materials and chemical science and technology capabilities at NREL, spanning fundamental and applied R&D for renewable energy and energy efficiency.   Key program areas include solar energy conversion for electricity and fuels, materials discovery and development for renewable energy technologies, hydrogen production and storage, and fuel cells.   Tumas is also the Director of the Center for Next Generation of Materials by Design Energy Frontier Research Center and was the director of the Center for Inverse Design EFRC. He also serves as the NREL laboratory point of contact for Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, responsible for sponsor interface, program management, and program execution. He joined NREL in December 2009 as Director of the Chemical and Materials Science Center at NREL.   Prior to NREL, Tumas was the Program Director for Applied Energy Programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). He was also the lead principal investigator of the DOE Center of Excellence for Chemical Hydrogen Storage and the group leader of the inorganic chemistry group in the Chemistry Division. He was a founding board member of Green Chemistry that is now part of the American Chemical Society. He started his career at Dupont Central Research as research scientist then a project leader in environmental and oxidation catalysis at DuPont Central Research, Wilmington, DE where he was also a member of the DuPont Corporate Catalysis Center and the Corporate Environmental Technology Panel.   His research activities have included materials by design, solar energy conversion, chemical hydrogen storage, homogeneous and phase-separable catalysis, catalytic transformations and chemical processing in supercritical fluids and alternate reaction media, green chemistry, and waste treatment technology development and assessment. He has over 50 peer-reviewed publications, 12 patents, and has given over 75 invited presentations.   Tumas received a BA in Chemistry from Ithaca College and a PhD from Stanford; he then did postdoctoral research at Caltech.

Research Interest

    Green Energy, Green Chemistry, Sustainability, renewable resources, biomass, biofuel, Green Engineering, green industrial applications, green investments, green process, green energy, biomaterials, nanotechnology, waste management, water treatment, bioreactors, bioprocessing