Terry Penney
Principal Laboratory Program Manager
Advanced Vehicle and Fuel Technologies
Terry Penney joined the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in 1979. Prior to joining NREL, he worked for Concentration, Heat and Momentum (CHAM) a consulting group headed by Prof. Brain Spalding based in London developing unique finite element computational codes for multiphase heat and mass transfer problems. He also worked Von Karmen Facility at the Arnold Engineering Development Center in middle Tennessee where he worked on the Space Shuttle program. At NREL he has worked on Ocean Energy, Buildings research, Optical and Thermal Fluid Science. More recently, he launched the Hybrid Vehicle program in 1992, which grew into a $300M Partnership for New Generation Vehicles (PNGV) between the government and GM, Ford and DaimlerChyrsler. Currently he is NREL's Laboratory Program Manager for Advanced Vehicle and Fuel Technologies responsible for both light and heavy-duty hybrid platforms.
He has more than 50 technical publications to his credit, including energy-related articles in Scientific American and the Encyclopedia Britannica. Terry has worked on computational fluid dynamics problems for a variety of applications and has pushed math-based analysis, which has evolved simultaneous multi-physics based tools with optimization including six-sigma, optimization and virtual proving ground. He has 35 years experience in testing and analysis in aerodynamics, heated mass transfer components, and advanced thermodynamic cycles, including gas turbines. He is an SAE member, a Baldridge team competition examiner, National Science Bowl scientific judge and winner of the Van Morris Award for performance. His undergraduate degree was from Purdue University in Aeronautical Engineering and Engineering Science and his graduate work was at the University of Tennessee in Mechanical Engineering. He received the MRI president’s award in 1992 for exceptional performance and the Van Morris award in 1996 for inspired leadership and forging links to industry.