Commencement Speaker
Thomas E. Mason
Director, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and President and CEO, UT-Battelle, LLC
Thomas Mason is a native of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in Canada. He graduated from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and completed his postgraduate study at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, receiving a Doctor of Philosophy degree in experimental condensed matter physics.
After completing his Ph.D., he held a postdoctoral fellowship at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, and then became a Senior Scientist at Risø National Laboratory in Denmark. In 1993 he joined the faculty of the Department of Physics at the University of Toronto.
Thom joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1998 as Scientific Director for the U.S. Department of Energy's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) project. In April 2001 he was named Associate Laboratory Director for SNS and Vice President of UT-Battelle, LLC, which manages ORNL for the Department. In 2006 he became Associate Laboratory Director for Neutron Sciences, leading a new organization charged with delivering safe and productive scientific facilities for studying the structure and dynamics of materials. In May 2007, Thom was named Director of ORNL and President and CEO of UT-Battelle.
Thom's research background is in the application of neutron scattering techniques to novel magnetic materials and superconductors using a variety of facilities in North America and Europe. He is author or coauthor of more than 100 refereed publications. In 1997, he was awarded an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. Thom was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2001, a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2007, and a Fellow of the Neutron Scattering Society of America in 2010. He received the Distinguished Alumni Award for the Sciences from McMaster University in 2008 and the degree of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, from Dalhousie University in May 2011.