Dr. Michael C. Wright joined the Instrumentation and Controls Division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1993, where he is presently leader of the Advanced Nuclear Measurements and Controls Group, a group of scientists, engineers, and technicians (including ORNL Corporate Fellow John Mihalczo) working in a wide range of topics in radiation detection and measurement. He is particularly involved with upgrades to the neutron scattering instruments at ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor.

For the past four years, he has also been Project Coordinator for the Materials Microcharacterization Collaboratory (MMC), a pilot project within DOE's DOE2000 program. The MMC is an interactive virtual laboratory that electronically links the scientists and instruments at materials science user facilities located at the Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, and Oak Ridge National Laboratories; the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Before joining ORNL, he was at Atom Sciences, a small Oak Ridge company striving to become a commercial supplier of products and services of a novel laser-based method for ultrasensitive trace element analysis and detection. In 1976, he was a Viking Intern on the Mars Viking Lander Imaging Team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Wright received a B.A. degree, with high honors, in honors mathematics from the University of Tennessee in 1977 and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Duke University in 1983.

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