Peter Green, Ph.D. ’85, receives 2022 MSE Alumni Award

Peter F. Green, Ph.D. ’85, deputy laboratory director for science and technology and the chief research officer for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has been selected as the 2022 MSE Alumni Award winner.

Green, who is also senior vice president of NREL’s parent company, the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, will formally receive the award Tuesday, May 3, during a celebration event to be hosted at Cornell’s Statler Hotel. Green will give a public seminar and details about how alumni can watch remotely are forthcoming.

“Dr. Green is everything that our department aspires for our students and alumni to be,” said Lara Estroff, MSE chair and professor. “He’s a world-class researcher, a leader, an educator and someone who is using his talents to help others reach their full potential as scientists and engineers.”

Green oversees NREL’s science and technology strategy and research portfolio. The lab operates three national centers and 16 research programs – including one for materials science – that published more than 2,160 scientific and technical papers last year. Green, a member of the MSE advisory board, is also responsible for NREL’s university interactions and its postdoctoral fellows program.

Green is a fellow of the Materials Research Society, American Physical Society, American Ceramics Society, Royal Society of Chemistry, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He serves on multiple boards and committees, and served as the president of the Materials Research Society in 2006.

He co-organized what is now the Joint Undertaking for an African Materials Institute, a National Science Foundation-funded initiative designed to foster a global community of materials science researchers with programs like SciBridge, which promotes scientific exchanges between the U.S. and Africa.

Prior to joining NREL in 2016, Green was chair of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, where his research group was devoted to developing a fundamental understanding of the structure and properties of soft materials for applications in energy conversion, active and passive coatings, membranes, sensors and electronics. Specific topics of interest included thin film nanocomposites, thin polymer films, organic electronics, polymer dynamics, and electrorheological fluids.

Green also held positions at the University of Texas-Austin and at Sandia National Laboratories. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Hunter College and his doctorate in materials science and engineering from Cornell, where he was advised by professor Ed Kramer.