18 Federal Lab Partnerships Earn R&D100 Awards

Federal laboratories accounted for 36 of this year's R&D100 awards, announced last week by R&D World magazine, and 18 of those wins were shared with a collaborative partner.

In addition, nine entries that included federal labs earned Special Recognition honors for contributions to the fight against COVID-19, corporate social responsibility, green tech and products or services that shook up an existing industry. And in the new Professional Awards category, two federal laboratories took home three of the five honors.

This renowned worldwide competition focused on research and development, now in its 61st year, received entries from 15 countries/regions. This year, the judging panel included 45 well-respected industry professionals from across the globe.

The federal lab wins included collaborations between laboratories, between agencies, and/or with industry, academic, or nonprofit partners.

ANALYTICAL/TEST CATEGORY

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Polar Onyx for "Additively Manufactured Thermally Conductive Collimators for Neutron Instrumentation"

MIT Lincoln Laboratory (MIT-LL), Massachusetts General Hospital and Sound & Bright for "Noncontact Laser Ultrasound for Medical Imaging"

ORNL and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville for "Physics-Informed, Active Learning-Driven Autonomous Microscopy for Science Discovery"

Sandia National Laboratories and Know Biological for "Pre-Symptomatic VOC Detector of Seizure Events"

IT/ELECTRICAL CATEGORY

MIT-LL and Naval Information Warfare Center (NIWC) Pacific for "Joint Communication Architecture for Unmanned Systems Security/Cyber Module End Cryptographic Unit"

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and SK hynix for "Ordered Key-value Computational Storage Device"

National Energy Technology Laboratory, the University of Pittsburgh and Sensible Photonics for "Transformer Watchman"

MECHANICAL/MATERIALS CATEGORY

Ames National Laboratory and Buntind-DuBois for "Critical Rare Earth Free Cerium Gap Magnets"

Idaho National Laboratory and Ames National Laboratory for "EASE: Ether-based Aqueous Separations and Extractions"

LANL; the University of Michigan; the University of California, Berkeley and Pecan Street for "Grid Regulation Delivered by Aggregations of Loads"

LANL; the National Institute of Standards and Technology; and the University of Colorado, Boulder for "Hyperspectral X-ray Imaging Detector"

SOFTWARE/SERVICES CATEGORY

Argonne National Laboratory, ORNL, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, LANL and Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research for "CANDLE (CANcer Distributed Learning Environment)"

Argonne National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory for "Cardinal: Accelerating Discovery in Fusion and Fission Energy"

Argonne National Laboratory, AT&T and the Federal Emergency Management Agency for "Climate Risk & Resilience Portal (ClimRR)"

Sandia National Laboratories and Hemholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf for "MALA: MAterials Learning Algorithms)"

Sandia National Laboratories and Stellar Science Ltd. for "Meta Optics Studio"

LANL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association for "PowerModelsONM: Optimizing Operations of Networked Microgrids for Resilience"

MIT-LL and the Air Force Research Laboratory for "Puckboard"

View the full list here

Special recognition was earned by:

LANL for:

• "FEVER: Fast Evaluation of Viral Emerging Risks" [Battling COVID-19 and Coporate Social Responsibility categories]
• "Grid Regulation Delivered by Aggregations of Loads" [Corporate Social Responsibility and Market Disruptor - Services categories]
• "Rapid Response Steel Tooling Using Additive Manufacturing" [Market Disruptor - Products category] and
• "Solution-Processed Perovskite Crystalline Films (SPeC) [Market Disruptor - Products category]

MIT-LL for "Noncontact Laser Ultrasound for Medical Imaging" [Market Disruptor - Products category]

Sandia National Laboratories for "Materials Data Driven Design (MAD3) [Market Disruptor - Services category]

Ames National Laboratory for "A Continuous Hot-Roll Process to Manufacture Nanograin Neo Magnet" [Corporate Social Responsibility category]

View all the Special Recognition winners 

Professional Awards were earned by:

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for R&D Leader of the Year and R&D Team of the Year

Ames National Laboratory for R&D Technician of the Year

View all of the Professional Award winners here