Committee

Bandana Kar

Bandana Kar, Acting Group Lead for the Built Environment Characterization Group

Bandana Kar is an R&D Staff and the Acting Group Lead for the Built Environment Characterization Group in the National Security Sciences Directorate at ORNL. Her research focuses on the intersection of science, technology and policy in the context of resilience of energy infrastructures and cities, risk communication and coupled built environment-natural systems. She was the recipient of the 2019 Emerging Scholar Award from the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) and was a fellow of the 2009 National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Enabling the Next Generation of Hazards and Disasters Researchers Fellowship Program. She is a co-editor of the book Risk Communication and Community Resilience and an Associate Editor/Social and Behavioral Science Editor for the ASCE Natural Hazards Review journal. She is a co-organizer of the ACM-SIGSPATIAL’s Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC) workshop. She has been funded by the NSF, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Energy, and NASA.

Rebecca A Efroymson

Rebecca Efroymson, Environmental Scientist

Rebecca Efroymson is an environmental scientist in the Environmental Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she is engaged in risk assessment, causal analysis, environmental and socioeconomic indicator development and analysis, and energy justice. Her research has evaluated spatially explicit environmental effects of energy production, including land-use change, biodiversity, water quality, water quantity, soil quality, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and pollination. She focuses on environmental and socioeconomic effects of biofuel production, and her past research has addressed oil production and wind energy. She is the former Editor-in-Chief of Environmental Management and is an elected fellow of AAAS.

Guodong Liu

Guodong Liu, Post-doctorate Research Associate

Guodong Liu received his Ph.D. degree in electric power engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2014. He has been working as Post-doctorate Research Associate (2014-2015) and R&D Staff (2015-present) in the Grid Components and Controls group of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Currently he leads projects on Microgrid planning and operation, renewable energy integration and active distribution network management. He was the major developer of CSEISMIC microgrid controller, DECC microgrid testbed and Microgrid Assisted Design for Remote Areas (MADRA) sponsored by the DOE. His research interests include power system operation and planning, power system reliability and resiliency assessment, distributed energy resource and microgrids. He is an IEEE senior member and twice winner of the IEEE PES General Meeting best paper award. He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed journals and conference papers.

Melissa Allen-Dumas

Melissa Allen-Dumas, Research Scientist

Melissa Allen-Dumas is a Research Scientist in the Computational Sciences and Engineering Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. She holds a PhD degree in Energy Science and Engineering and a MS degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Tennessee. Her expertise includes global modeling and analysis of atmospheric species transport, statistical and dynamical downscaling of various climate model output, analysis of direct and indirect effects of climate change on electricity demand, and on other national and civic critical infrastructures. She is the lead for the ORNL Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability theme within the Climate Change Science Institute; and a member of the Urban Dynamics Institute.

Carter Christopher, Distinguished R&D Staff Member and Section Head, Human Dynamics R&D

Dr. Carter Christopher is Head of the Human Dynamics R&D Section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Dr. Christopher leads Human Geography, Built Environment Characterization, and Geoinformatics Engineering research groups at the lab, to solve national- and global-scale challenges for National and Energy Security. Prior to joining ORNL, Dr. Christopher was Head of Geospatial at an aerospace start-up, and he had a distinguished 12-year career in the Intelligence Community (IC). Carter spent 11 years at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), where he led a number of transformational efforts at the agency. He led organizations and programs that delivered ML and CV-derived object detection and mapping for mission operations; he was a founder and leader of NGA's program for cloud modernization, DevOps, SaaS provisioning for the IC; he established and staffed the agency's data science and advanced geospatial analysis mission organizations; and he led global GIS training for the agency. Dr. Christopher closed his Federal career at the US State Department as Deputy Director of the Office of the Geographer and Global Issues in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. In that role, he served as deputy to the Geographer of the United States, he led and managed intelligence and humanitarian analysis and mapping in support of policy makers, and helped stand up the Department’s enterprise GIS. Prior to Federal service, Carter held management and technical roles in the private sector, supporting Federal, state, and local clients. Dr. Christopher has a PhD in Earth Systems and Geoinformation Science from George Mason University, a MS in Geography and Remote Sensing from the University of Southern Mississippi, and a BA in Government from the College of William and Mary.

Juan Restrepo, Head of the Mathematics in Computation

Juan M. Restrepo is the section head of the Mathematics in Computation at ORNL. One line of his research focuses on probabilistic methods for dynamics and AI/ML. He also works on climate science, with a focus on ocean processes. He is a fellow of SIAM and of APS and holds the career award in Geosciences from SIAM (2017).