Ceremony
Announcements:
An Awards Ceremony honoring the 2026 Ernest O. Lawrence Award Laureates will be held on Friday, November 13, 2026 at 2:00 p.m. ET, in the Large Auditorium of the DOE James V. Forrestal Building in Washington, D.C. The ceremony will be a hybrid event and will be streamed live online. A reception will follow in the Forrestal Cafeteria from 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. ET.
Registration is required for in-person and virtual attendance, the registration page can be found here: 2026 Lawrence Award Ceremony. To attend in person, please register by October 30, 2026. A live link for the virtual ceremony will be posted on this page once available.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced nine U.S. scientists and engineers as recipients of the prestigious Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award.
The 2026 Ernest O. Lawrence Award recipients are:
Eric J. Schelter, Ph.D. (University of Pennsylvania) - Atomic, Molecular, and Chemical Sciences - Honored for his “fundamental chemical studies of energy-critical metals leading to new methods for their selective and sustainable separations.”
Patrick Chain, Ph.D. (Los Alamos National Laboratory and New Mexico Consortium) - Biological and Environmental Sciences - Honored for his “pioneering work in in genomics and microbiome science, including discoveries of new bacterial-fungal interactions and revolutionizing the field by democratizing access to advanced bioinformatics tools.”
Samuel W. Williams, Ph.D. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) - Computer, Information, and Knowledge Sciences - Honored for his “pioneering contributions in performance modeling, hardware/software design optimization, and novel computer architecture for high performance computing, enabling modeling of complex computational solutions, and increasing analysis speed, simulation accuracy, and computational efficiency.”
Thomas Epps, III, Ph.D. (University of Delaware) - Condensed Matter and Materials Sciences - Honored for his “fundamental contributions in chemistry and materials science with applications in the chemical upcycling of polymeric waste, generation of high-performance materials from biomass feedstocks, and development of membranes for lithium-ion battery technologies.”
Gregg T. Beckham, Ph.D. (National Laboratory of the Rockies and University of Colorado-Boulder) - Energy Science and Innovation - Honored for his “transformative research in the conversion of lignocellulosic biomass and waste plastics via biology, chemistry, and engineering, yielding building blocks for sustainable fuels, chemicals, and materials.”
Andrea L. Kritcher, Ph.D. (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) - Fusion and Plasma Sciences - Honored for her “exceptional design efforts leading to the first-ever achievement of fusion ignition in the laboratory, which is of major scientific impact to institutional and national missions, the private sector, and fusion interests within academia.”
Charles C. Polly, Ph.D. (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) - High Energy Physics - Honored for his “exceptional scientific and technical contributions to low-energy precision measurements in particle physics, most notably leadership of the experimental measurement of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon with the Muon g-2 experiment.”
Michael Reed, Ph.D. (Nevada National Security Site) - National Security and Nonproliferation - Honored for his “vital contributions to national and international nuclear emergency response through the Advanced Visualization & Integration of Data (AVID) software, which broke existing paradigms by simultaneously fusing all radiological data into a single interface connected seamlessly to world-wide expertise.”
Lijuan Ruan, Ph.D. (Brookhaven National Laboratory) - Nuclear Physics - Honored for her “outstanding leadership and ingenuity in the design, construction, and operation of novel detector systems in the STAR experiment, transforming dilepton final states into precision probes of heavy ion collisions.”
