Dr. David L. McCollum is a Distinguished R&D Staff in the Energy Science and Technology Directorate (ESTD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as well as a Joint Faculty Professor at the University of Tennessee’s Baker School of Public Policy. He is Director of DecisionScience@ORNL and ORNL’s ARMADA Research Program, and co-leads ORNL’s Southeast Resilience Accelerator Initiative (SERA). David’s expertise spans economics, engineering, policy analysis, and corporate advisory services, and his research attempts to inform state, national, and global energy and environmental issues on matters related to, among others, resilient future pathways, energy-transport-climate policies, electric sector planning, end-use sector electrification (transport, buildings, industry), AI data centers and quantum computing, Sustainable Development Goals (including inter-dependencies), financing needs for the energy system, and human dimensions of global change. He employs energy-economic systems, multi-sector dynamics, and integrated assessment models in support of this work (e.g., MESSAGEix-GLOBIOM, TIMES-MARKAL, REGEN, GCAM), as well as techno-economic analysis (TEA), life-cycle analysis (LCA), and geospatial science approaches.
Before joining ORNL in September 2021, David was a Senior Research Scholar with the Energy Program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg, Austria, and a Principal Technical Leader at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, California. He currently holds a secondary appointment as Guest Senior Research Scholar at IIASA, and previously was Honorary Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London. The latter was in his capacity with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Technical Support Unit (TSU – Working Group III) for the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6). David previously led activities within the Global Energy Assessment; IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5 – WG III); IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C; and other international, multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as for the World Bank and International Science Council (ISC). He is listed by Reuters as one of the world’s 250 most influential climate scientists.
David received a PhD and MS in Transportation Technology & Policy from the University of California, Davis (USA), Institute of Transportation Studies; an MS in Agricultural & Resource Economics from the same institution; and a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tennessee (USA).