Distinguished Alumni Award

25 July 2006 — Alan Schriesheim has been named a Penn State Distinguished Alumnus. The Distinguished Alumni Award, Penn State's highest honor, is presented by the Board of Trustees to graduates whose professional achievements, personal qualities, and community involvement exemplify the goals of Penn State.

Schriesheim was the director of Argonne National Laboratory, the first national laboratory established by the Federal Government in 1946, from 1983 until 1996. Under his leadership, Argonne's budget increased from $250 million to nearly $600 million, with 500 employees working on multiple research programs. He oversaw projects including developing high-temperature superconductors, research on biological microchips, sequencing the human genome, and work on nuclear engineering. He also championed the design and construction of the Advanced Photon Source, a $456 million accelerator three-quarters of a mile in diameter.

Prior to joining Argonne, he worked for Standard Oil-better known as Esso and then Exxon-for 27 years. He was general manager of Exxon Engineering and director of the Corporate Research Laboratory. During he tenure at Exxon, he won the American Chemical Society's award for research in petroleum chemistry.

Schriesheim is a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Chemical Society, the American Petroleum Institute, and the American Institute of Chemical Engineering, and he holds 22 U.S. patents. He was recently appointed as chair of the Committee on Innovation Models for Aerospace Technologies-a joint effort of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council.

Schriesheim earned a doctoral degree in chemistry at Penn State in 1954 and a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Brooklyn College Polytechnic Institute in 1951. At Penn State, he was honored as an Alumni Fellow in 1984 and received an honorary doctor of science degree in 2001. He is a member of the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Board of Visitors and delivered the commencement address for the Penn State Eberly College of Science in 1995.

[ S S G / L A K ]