As Director of the Energy and Earth Systems Center at Sandia National Laboratories, Carol Adkins provides leadership and management direction for Sandia’s Applied Energy, Grid, and Earth Science research and development programs. She also serves as Program Area Director for the Secure Energy and Earth Systems Program within Sandia’s Energy & Homeland Security Portfolio.
Previously, Carol was Director of the Energy Technologies and System Solutions Center, overseeing all of Sandia’s Renewable-Energy and Grid programs. Some of her past management roles include Director of Materials Science and Engineering; Deputy Director of the Nuclear Weapons Science and Technology Strategic Area with responsibility for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s science and infrastructure funding at Sandia; and Principal Program Director for the Defense Security Program, including all physical and cyber security at Sandia.
Since joining Sandia in 1987, Carol has performed research in the areas of chemical vapor deposition of ceramics and tungsten, aerosol processing, cleaning with supercritical CO2, and semiconductor-wafer contamination and cleaning. Carol led the wafer-cleaning project under the Sandia/SEMATECH cooperative research and development agreement, which extended standard wet-clean techniques to the next generation of particle removal. She and her team were awarded the Department of Energy’s Office of Industrial Technologies Commercialization Award for their supercritical CO2 cleaning work.
Carol has served on the National Research Council’s Board on Manufacturing and Engineering Design and as a member of the Panel on Manufacturing Engineering, assessing the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She chairs the University of New Mexico’s (UNM’s) Chemical and Biological Engineering Department External Advisory Council and is a past member of the University of Texas- Austin’s Chemical Engineering Department External Advisory Panel. Carol also serves as Sandia’s campus executive for UNM. She is passionate about supporting women at Sandia and has been Co-Chair of the Sandia Women’s Action Network.
Carol has a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from UNM and was a National Science Foundation Fellow at the California Institute of Technology, where she received a PhD in chemical engineering. She was also a Fellow of MITs Seminar XXI Program in International Security. UNM’s School of Engineering presented Carol with a Distinguished Alumni Award in 2015.