Lee Riedinger became the
Deputy Director for Science and Technology at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory
on April 1, 2000. Before joining ORNL
as part of the UT-Battelle team, he was head of the Department of Physics and
Astronomy at the University of Tennessee, and had been on the faculty since
1971, a full professor since 1978. He
worked also as a part-time member of the ORNL Physics Division 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. 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.
His field is
experimental nuclear physics, emphasizing properties of high-spin states in
deformed nuclei. He has been an author
of 180 refereed publications, given 55 invited talks at conferences and
workshops, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). 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. In 1983-84, he was the science
advisor to Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, then the majority leader of the U.S.
Senate.
Dr. Riedinger received a bachelor’s degree in physics from Thomas More College in Kentucky in 1964 and a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1968. His doctoral research was performed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.