Michael Knotek was the Deputy Undersecretary for Science and Energy at the Department of Energy (US/S&E) from 2013 to 2015.
During his time, US/S&E managed the programs and laboratories of the Office of Science so the DOE can closely integrate and move quickly among basic science, applied research, technology demonstration, and deployment. These include The Offices of Fossil Energy (FE), Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Nuclear Energy (NE), as well as the Offices of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE), Indian Energy (IE), and of Technology Transfer Coordinator. This office provides the framework for the feedback among the various elements to facilitate implementation of the President’s Climate-Action-Plan, All-of-the-above national energy strategy, and the nation’s general science and energy goals. Knotek is a physicist with more than 50 years of research and management experience within the Energy Enterprise.
From 2010 to 2013 he was Director of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute at the University of Colorado. He has extensive research, management and consulting experience with Sandia, Brookhaven, Pacific Northwest, Argonne, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Idaho, Lawrence Berkeley, Ames National Laboratories, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. During this career he has led DOE wide program formulation activities in Synchrotron Science and Facilities, Environmental Science, Fusion Sciences, High Performance Computation, and post-genomic Biology. In addition to senior Lab Management positions he previously served as senior science and technology adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Energy and was chief technology officer with the Battelle Memorial Institute. Knotek was a private consultant from 2001 through 2010, working with a wide range of Laboratories, DOE program offices, and other national Science and Technology concerns across a wide swath of renewable, fossil, and nuclear energy science and technology. He is widely published as a scientist and is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society.
