INTERCONNECTS

Richard (Dick) Ziegler, director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Transportation Programs and the National Transportation Research Center User Facility, has been named chairman of the new regional Alliance for Secure Energy and Transportation. John Powell, executive director of the Advanced Transportation Technology Institute in Chattanooga, has been named the alliance's executive director. The alliance was formed to link together top research and development interests in the Tennessee Valley to help spur the region to become a national leader in researching, designing, developing, testing and demonstrating cleaner and more fuel efficient transportation technologies. The organization - announced recently at the Tennessee Valley Corridor economic summit in Chattanooga by U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp, R-Tenn., both from Tennessee - hopes to encourage new transportation technologies that will result in less pollution from vehicles while reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. The alliance was formed out of the Tennessee Valley Corridor Summit's initiative on clean transportation through the leadership of ORNL, the Advanced Transportation Technology Institute and the Tennessee Valley Corridor. Additional members of the alliance are the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, University of Tennessee Knoxville, the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, University of Tennessee Space Institute, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Hydrocore, Inc., City of Knoxville, IdleAir Technologies, Knox County, SAIC, East Tennessee Clean Fuels Coalition and many other institutional partners in the Tennessee Valley Technology Corridor. Ziegler has been employed since1969 at ORNL with a significant part of that time dedicated to automotive research. Under his leadership, ORNL's Transportation Program performs research and development in support of DOE's FutureCAR program to produce a hydrogen-powered vehicle and the Twenty-First Century Truck Partnership to significantly improve the efficiency of medium and heavy trucks. He has worked with the automotive and trucking industry to establish a thorough understanding of its technology needs in helping DOE define its research pathway and to establish transportation research programs at ORNL. Ziegler earned a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the University of Wisconsin. He and his wife, Jane Herron, reside in Oak Ridge. He has two adult children and four grandchildren. ORNL is a multiprogram science and technology laboratory managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy.