Michelle V Buchanan

Michelle Buchanan currently serves as Senior Technical Advisor to the Deputy Director for Science Programs in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. Prior to this assignment, she served as Deputy Director for Science and Technology at ORNL, overseeing ORNL’s extensive portfolios of research and development, spanning physical and materials sciences, energy and engineering sciences, computing and computational sciences, biological and environmental sciences, neutron sciences, and global security. She also served in several other technical management positions at ORNL, including Associate Laboratory Director for Physical Sciences, overseeing four research divisions covering the disciplines of chemistry, materials sciences, physics and nanoscience, Director of the Chemical Sciences Division, Associate Director of the Life Sciences Division, and Leader of the Organic and Biological Mass Spectrometry Group in the Chemical Sciences Division.   She initiated the Center for Structural Molecular Biology, serving as its first director.  She joined ORNL after earning a B.S. in chemistry from the University of Kansas, and a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Buchanan is the author or co-author of more than 150 scientific publications and reports, holds two patents, and was editor of a book on Fourier transform mass spectrometry. Dr. Buchanan is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).  She was North American editor of Biological Mass Spectrometry and has served on the editorial boards of Analytical Chemistry, Organic Mass Spectrometry, Journal of Mass Spectrometry, Biological and Environmental Mass Spectrometry, and Fresenius' Journal of Analytical Chemistry.  She has held multiple offices in the American Chemical Society (ACS) at the national and local levels and served as treasurer for the American Society for Mass Spectrometry.  She was named as recipient of the Roland Hirsch Award for Distinguished Service in Analytical Chemistry in 2022. She has also served on numerous advisory boards of universities and for major research centers, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Kansas, Vanderbilt University, the University of North Carolina, Cornell University, Boston University, and the University of Tennessee. Over the past two decades she has worked at the national level helping define basic research needs in a number of key energy-related areas.