Lee L. Riedinger is the head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and has been on the faculty of since 1971, a full professor since 1978. He worked also as a part-time member of the Physics Division at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 15 years until 1993. He served from 1988 to 1991 as the director of the Science Alliance Center of Excellence, a program devoted to building joint research between UT and ORNL. He worked from 1991 to 1995 as the UT Associate Vice Chancellor for Research, which was then the chief research officer for the University. From 1993 to 1996 he was the first chair of the Tennessee Science and Technology Advisory Council, which advises the Governor and the Legislature on technical priorities for the state. From 1994 to 1996 he served on the steering committee for the Tennessee Information Infrastructure, a federally funded effort to plan the networking infrastructure for the state. In 1995 he was the president of the annual WATTec science and technology conference in Knoxville, and in the same year the chair of the Technology Committee of the Oak Ridge Summit on Science and Technology, initiated and led by Congressman Zack Wamp from Tennessee. From 1990 to 1994 he was on the board of directors of the Oak Ridge Chamber of Commerce.

His field is experimental nuclear physics, emphasizing properties of high-spin states in deformed nuclei; he has been an author of 170 refereed publications, given 55 invited talks at conferences and workshops, and been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). His research has been funded by the Department of Energy since 1976. He currently serves on the Argonne Atlas and Los Alamos LANSCE Program Advisory Committees, and on the Gammasphere Users Executive Committee. Various sabbatical leaves have been spent at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark. He served as the elected chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the APS in 1996, and continues to chair the divisional Committee on the Funding of Nuclear Physics. This committee is active each year in following the federal budgets for nuclear physics and advocating for increased funding for the field. In 1983-84, he served as science advisor to Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who was then the majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

Riedinger served from 1992 to 1998 as the University of Tennessee member of the SURA (Southeastern Universities Research Association) board and a member of its Executive Committee. He served as the UT councilor for the Oak Ridge Associated Universities from 1992 to 1995. He was a member of the DOE/NSF Nuclear Science Advisory Committee from 1990 to 1993, and again in 1996. He chaired the Gordon Research Conference on Nuclear Chemistry in 1985.

Throughout 1999 he worked on the UT-Battelle proposal to manage the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The October 20, 1999 announcement of this contract award will result in his assumption of the position of ORNL Deputy Director for Science and Technology on April 1, 2000.

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