INL names new associate lab director for energy, environment, science, techology

Todd E. Combs

Todd E. Combs, presently the director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Global Security Sciences Division, will be coming May 1 to be Idaho National Laboratory’s associate lab director for Energy and Environment Science & Technology (EES&T).

At Argonne, Combs has led a multidisciplinary research team of over 200, working on preventing and responding to national and global security threats. Before that he spent nearly 14 months as Argonne’s interim associate laboratory director for Energy and Global Security, where he led an applied R&D organization of over 800 that addressed domestic and global sustainable energy and security issues. In that role, he oversaw research and operational activities of the energy systems, nuclear engineering, and global security sciences divisions.

He has managed Argonne’s advanced grid modeling program for DOE, and its relationship with the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, he was an operations research scientist and served as group leader of the Transportation Planning and Decision Science group.

Combs’ research has included energy systems modeling and analysis for DOE, most recently related to critical materials supply chains. He has worked on modeling and simulation projects Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.

He holds a doctorate in operations research and master’s degree in operations analysis from the Air Force Institute of Technology, and is a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Title One adds Krisi Staten as business strategist

Krisi Staten

Kerry Berry

TitleOne has added Krisi Staten as its new business strategist. Staten comes from the Idaho Falls Downtown Development Corporation, where she has been executive director sine July 2014. Before that, she was a benefits specialist for Idaho National Laboratory. A native of Arco, she has extensive service on the boards of various eastern Idaho service organizations.

Also at TitleOne, Kerry Berry has teamed up with Heather Elverud as her escrow assistant.

TitleOne is a local title and escrow company serving western and eastern Idaho since 2000. Its offices are located at 1614 Elk Creek Drive. Its web address is http://www.titleonecorp.com/.

New director named to head Center for Advanced Energy Studies

Dr. Noël Bakhtian

Noël Bakhtian has been named the new director of the Center for Advanced Energy Studies, the research and education consortium between Boise State University, Idaho National Laboratory, Idaho State University, University of Idaho and University of Wyoming.

The announcement was made Tuesday by INL Director Mark Peters, who cited her experience in energy policy and technology. Bakhtian will start May 15, replacing Mike Hagood, who has been interim director since last fall.

Bakhtian most recently served as senior policy advisor for environment and energy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Prior to that, she was the inaugural Energy-Water Nexus lead at the U.S. Department of Energy Office of International Affairs. She was technical lead on several grant programs for DOE’s Wind and Water Power Technologies Office,  and consulted on energy research and development and investment for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

While pursuing her master’s and doctorate from Stanford University’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, she did most of her research at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in its advanced computing division, coming up with new entry, descent and landing technology for Mars missions. After getting her Ph.D., she won an AAAS Energy and Environment Fellowship and worked in the office of U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.

Bakhtian also holds a master’s degree in engineering from Cambridge University, where she was a Churchill Scholar. Her research there involved unmanned ariel vehicles, gathering data from bird flight patterns in wind tunnels. Her bachelor’s degree is from Duke University, where she was a Pratt Fellow.

Bakhtian is a trustee of the Summer Science Program, a science education non-profit organization, and is the energy and environment associate editor for the Science & Diplomacy Journal.

“Dr. Bakhtian’s energy policy and technical experiences span the programmatic portfolio of CAES,” Peters said in a press release. “She will help forward the CAES mission of conducting advanced energy research, educating the next generation of scientists and engineers, and partnering with industry to advance our regional competitiveness.”

For a November 2016 interview Bakhtian gave the website chroniclevitae.com, follow this link: From Bench Science to Senior Policy Advising: An Interview With Noel Bakhtian.

INL releases new open source software

This is probably going to be a little esoteric to those who come here wondering when, if ever, Costco is coming to Idaho Falls. But here goes.

Idaho National Laboratory has released a new open-source software free to the public on the lab’s GitHub website. The Risk Analysis and Virtual Environment (RAVEN) framework will be available for collaboration with the public to refine and improve the functionality of the system, to join forces with other researchers to expand the feature set, and to give industry a powerful and useful tool for accelerating technological advances.

RAVEN is a unique and powerful tool for risk analysis, offering capabilities not currently available in other software. It offers a fully integrated working environment, providing engineers and scientists new abilities to tackle challenging problems efficiently.

Operations such as analysis, data mining and model optimization can be performed based on the response of complex physical models through advanced statistical sampling generation, generating a high degree of realism and accuracy.

This week in history

My grandfather, Harry A. Menser, in 1918. He was already 30 when the United States entered World War I, this week in 1917. He was the grandson of a Civil War Union soldier himself.

Looking Back now runs in the Sunday Post Register. This is the column that ran in the April 2, 2017 issue. The United States entered World War I on April 5, 1917, but Company M from eastern Idaho was already on the move.

100 years ago
The day after President Woodrow Wilson's April 2, 1917 call to Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, businesses in Idaho Falls closed at noon and schools emptied so the community could bid farewell to the 138 men of Company M, bound for Boise on April 4. "The ranks of the local company have been added to largely by recruits from Roberts, Rexburg, Menan, Rigby, Shelley, Blackfoot and other nearby points and many from out in the county and adjoining counties," the Idaho Register said. Levi E. Lundberg was notified from headquarters in Boise that he was receiving a captain's commission. Other commissioned officers were to be chosen when the company arrived.

75 years ago
Idaho Falls was determined to get serious about enforcing traffic laws this week in 1942, as evidenced by a Page One editorial in the Post Register, which said, "There will be a few days of education, a few days of warnings in police court, and then there will be strict enforcement with attendant fines. ... A bad condition, made bad by the failure of previous administrations to do anything, has been greatly aggravated by the large number of bicycles that have come into the picture in the last few months. ... Strict enforcement will gripe a good many people who are not accustomed to being told they must observe stop signs, red lights, speed limits and other regulations needed to guarantee the orderly flow of traffic in a thriving city. But strict enforcement is necessary, and the Post-Register is happy to see the administration stiffen up."

50 years ago
A final decision on awarding the contract for the construction of Skyline High School was expected this week in April 1967. The Idaho Falls School District Board of Trustees met for two hours on April 1 with the architects, Lawrence E. Matson and Associates, accountant Gilbert Karst and attorney William S. Holden, in an attempt to hold the building's costs within the bounds of legal and financial possibility. With $2.6 million in hand, the district estimated it was $57,000 short of the amount they needed to have before the contract could be let to Taysom Construction of Pocatello, low bidders on the project.

25 years ago
Some buildings were closed this week in 1992 at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory's Chemical Processing Plant as crews from Westinghouse Idaho Nuclear Co. cleaned up radioactive flakes accidentally released from a smokestack on April 2. No ICPP workers were contaminated during the radiation alert. Officials said the solid, slightly radioactive materials were limited to an area of about 250 square yards.