Three faculty members at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, are among the recipients of 2026 R&D 100 Awards. Jack Dongarra, professor emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, and Yilu Liu, UT-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair for Power Grids, are being honored for their work on innovations that will benefit large-scale scientific computing and protect critical infrastructure. Parans Paranthaman, who holds a joint appointment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and UT, has been recognized as the 2026 R&D 100 Researcher of the Year.
For more than 60 years, the R&D 100 Awards have served as the most prestigious worldwide science and technology competition that recognizes new commercial products, technologies and materials that are available for sale or license. This year’s awards ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 19 in Scottsdale, Arizona.
“These faculty members’ work exemplifies the role of public land-grant universities like UT,” said Deb Crawford, the university’s vice chancellor for research, innovation and economic development. “They model to the state and to the world how research shapes the future through high-impact solutions.”
Supercomputers power weather predictions, drug development, advanced materials development and many other processes that benefit everyday life. These powerful large-scale computers have millions of components and processors running in parallel.
When — not if — one component fails, the entire system is typically affected. Processes stop. Users lose valuable time and resources they had already invested as well as any potential discoveries the failed computing processes would have revealed.
Dongarra and the Innovative Computing Laboratory at UT partnered with Sandia National Laboratories to develop a mechanism that allows computing processes to rapidly recover and keep running. Dongarra’s team supplied Sandia with the techniques and technology to provide their supercomputing applications with resilience in the face of hardware or process failures.
“Together, we created Fenix, an open-source software that functions like an emergency response team for supercomputing applications,” Dongarra said. “Fenix can detect what’s broken, repair it, restore what was lost and restart the computing processes from the point of failure — not from the very beginning.”
Fenix, which is available for free and already being used in additional real-world applications, has earned Dongarra and the ICL their fifth R&D 100 Award.
“Fenix comes out of many years of research and development in the ICL,” Dongarra said. “We’re delighted to be in the position to provide such a technology to the scientific community, and our hope is that many more people benefit from it.”
GPS serves more functions than mapping driving routes. It also serves as a timekeeping system for applications that require precise synchronization, from stock trading to national security to power grid operations.
GPS, however, is not totally secure. “It’s highly effective under normal conditions. But satellites could bump into each other. Signals could be spoofed by cosmic radiation or malicious attack,” said Liu , who serves as deputy director of CURENT , an engineering research center that focuses on electric power and energy systems. “These disruptions to precise timekeeping could jeopardize critical infrastructure operations.”
With funding from the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation Program, Liu led UT and ORNL researchers in creating a backup timing option. It’s based not on instrumentation but a universal constant: the fixed rate at which neutron stars, called pulsars, rotate in space.
Using astronomical data from the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, Liu’s team engineered a hardware system that transforms pulsar signals into a usable pulse-per-second output that is highly precise and resilient to disruption.
This is Liu’s sixth R&D 100 Award in the past seven years. She credits a robust partnership with ORNL and support from both federal and industry sources for creating a productive environment for inventing.
“Competing for these awards helps get students excited about inventions,” she said. “Ultimately, we want more students to get involved in taking technology from ideas to usable beneficial solutions.”
Paranthaman, a corporate fellow in ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division, has held a joint UT faculty appointment in the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education since its establishment in 2010.
Over the past three decades, Paranthaman has invented more than 100 technologies, many of which are relevant to batteries, magnets, superconductors, water-repellent coatings and critical material recovery. He holds more than 65 U.S. patents.
UT students regularly contribute to Paranthaman’s innovations, such as the process he developed to recover lithium from wastewater produced by oil and gas operations. This technology, for which Paranthaman won an R&D 100 Award in 2024, was licensed by Texas company Element3.
Earlier this year, Element3 used the process and other technologies developed by ORNL and UT to launch commercial production of lithium carbonate, a raw material used in making lithium-ion batteries. It was the first new domestic lithium project to reach the market in the U.S. in more than 50 years.
“The Researcher of the Year award continues to enhance the national and international visibility of UT and ORNL,” Paranthaman said. “It recognizes how commercial technologies invented at these institutions help build domestic industry supply chains, create new jobs, drive economic growth and strengthen U.S. competitiveness.”