Jim Brainard - Chemical and Biosciences Center Director
Jim Brainard is the director of the Chemical and Biosciences Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Research in the center focuses on understanding energy conversion phenomena in biological, chemical, and nanoscale systems that will lead to future generations of renewable and sustainable energy technologies. Of particular interest is developing the fundamental understanding of structure, dynamics, and function in natural- and human-engineered systems necessary for more efficient and cost-effective solar photoconversion, hydrogen production, and biomass-to-biofuels conversion technologies.
Dr. Brainard received a Ph.D. in Chemistry from Indiana University, an NIH Post Doctoral Fellowship award for study at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, and a Director’s Post Doctoral Fellowship award at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He subsequently joined Los Alamos as a staff member, where he spent 25 years prior to joining the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 2006. While at Los Alamos, his research interests focused primarily on the effects of microbes and microbial products on radionuclide speciation and mobility in the environment and on microbes and microbial transformations of organic xenobiotics. He held a number of leadership positions at Los Alamos during the last years of his tenure there, including group leader for the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and the Genomic Sequencing and Computational Biology groups and the deputy division leader for Biosciences.