Parans Paranthaman

M. Parans Paranthaman is a Distinguished Research Staff Member and a Group Leader of Materials Chemistry in the Chemical Sciences Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a Distinguished Inventor at ORNL, and Fellow of The American Ceramic Society, ASM International and the Institute of Physics, London, UK. He has had a joint faculty appointment with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Bredesen Center as a Professor since 2010.

He earned his PhD in solid state chemistry and materials science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1988. He was named the Lockheed-Martin scientist of the year in 1997. He has authored or co-authored more than 350 publications with an “h-index” of 55 (Google scholar citation) and issued 30 U.S. Patents related to superconductivity, energy storage and solar cells. He ranked #2 in worldwide citations in the high temperature superconductivity research in the last decade (1999-2009). He was a guest editor for the MRS Bulletin; August 2004 issue featured high temperature superconductors.

Dr. Paranthaman has co-edited several books and co-organized several conferences and workshops. He has won several awards including DOE outstanding mentor awards, four R&D 100 Awards and three National and two Regional Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) Awards for developing high performance second-generation superconducting wires for electric-power applications and flexible thin film crystalline Silicon photovoltaics on RABiTS. Since 2004, he has served as the associate editor for the Journal of American Ceramic Society. His present research focuses on the development of flexible thin film solar cells, radiation resistant polymer composites, coated conductors, additive manufacturing of permanent magnets, lithium separation from geothermal brine, and energy storage materials.