Battelle, the company managing Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for the Department of Energy, will search for a new PNNL director, as its incumbent, Steven Ashby, steps down for a new role at Battelle. Ashby has contributed a “remarkable legacy of scientific discovery” as the company’s longest-tenured lab director, Lou Von Thaer, Battelle president and CEO and a Wash100 awardee, said in a PNNL statement Monday.
“We are grateful to Steve for his decade of leadership at PNNL and look forward to further benefitting from his knowledge and expertise as he takes on an expanded role with our national laboratory operations team,” Thaer remarked.
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Steven Ashby’s PNNL Career
Ashby has been leading PNNL since 2015, managing its $1.6 billion research budget and about 6,400 Batelle employees assigned to PNNL operations. Under his tenure, the lab undertook a $1 billion campus modernization that replaced aging infrastructure and installed new research facilities, such as the Energy Sciences Center and Grid Storage Launchpad. Ashby also established several strategic PNNL collaborations, including six joint institutes with five major universities.
Other alliances that PNNL forged in recent years included a collaboration with Microsoft and the University of Washington to advance multisector research on quantum information science. In January 2024, the DOE lab also partnered with Microsoft to accelerate scientific discovery through the combination of advanced artificial intelligence with high-performance cloud computing.
Ashby cited his PNNL tenure as the highlight of his career. “I am proud of all that we have accomplished, and I look forward to watching PNNL continue to thrive and deliver amazing outcomes for our nation,” he commented.
Other Career Highlights
Previous to his director’s role at the lab, Ashby served as PNNL deputy director for science and technology for over six years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He began his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked for over 12 years and served last as the lab’s deputy principal associate director for science and technology.
Battelle expects to appoint a new PNNL director in four to eight months, and Ashby will stay as lab director in the meantime. With his successor in place, he will take on the role of Batelle senior vice president of strategic partnerships to support management of Battelle-affiliated laboratories.
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