David Wood

Biography

Dr. David L. Wood, III is currently on entrepreneurial leave from Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a Senior Staff Scientist working for SkyNano, LLC as the Director of Engineering.  In his current role, Dr. Wood manages a team of 5 engineers and 3 technicians with the mission of scaling molten carbonate electrolysis and CO₂ capture to industrially relevant levels for producing CO₂-derived solid-carbon nanomaterials.  Since 2009 when Dr. Wood joined ORNL, he has researched and managed diverse projects in the areas of novel electrode architectures, mass transport phenomena, solid-liquid surface chemistry, advanced processing methods, manufacturing science, and materials characterization for polymer electrolyte fuel cells (PEFCs), PEM electrolyzers, lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, solid-state batteries, and flow batteries.  He is also a former University of Tennessee Bredesen Center Faculty Member (2013-2021), the former ORNL Fuel Cell Technologies Program Manager (2011-2018), the former Roll-to-Roll Manufacturing Team and Group Leader (2015-2017), and an internationally known energy conversion and storage researcher with an industrial and academic career that began in 1995.

From 1997 to 2002, he was employed by General Motors Corporation and SGL Carbon Group, excelling at applied R&D related to automotive and stationary polymer electrolyte fuel cell (PEFC) technology.  Later work (2003-2009) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and Cabot Corporation focused on elucidation of key PEFC chemical degradation mechanisms, development of accelerated testing methods, and component development.  Dr. Wood received his B.S. in Chemical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1994, his M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1998, and his Ph.D. in Electrochemical Engineering from the University of New Mexico in 2007.

He was part of two LANL research teams that won the DOE Hydrogen Program R&D Award for outstanding achievement in 2005 and 2009, and part of the Cabot Corporation Direct Methanol Fuel Cell team, which won the Samuel W. Bodman Award for Excellence in 2008.  Dr. Wood was also the 2011 winner of the ORNL Early Career Award for Engineering Accomplishment and has led teams that won 2013 and 2022 R&D 100 awards and 2014 and 2022 Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) awards.  He has received 20 patents and patent applications (18 granted), authored 109 refereed journal articles and transactions papers (Google Scholar h-index = 46), and authored 2 book chapters.