Jeff Muhs – Executive Director - Jeff Muhs organized elab after being hired as a USTAR professor at Utah State University and now serves as its Executive Director. Jeff and his colleagues at USU founded elab to create new energy innovations that help free America from its energy dilemma within a generation and spin out successful businesses across Utah and the U.S. that capitalize on these innovations.
A lifelong innovator, Jeff grew up on a farm in Southern Illinois and spent summers with his dad building houses by day and driving tractors at night. After graduating from college, he worked at Amphenol Fiber Optic Products and developed their line of multimode fiber optic splitters used in local area networks. Jeff next worked for DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Among his inventions there was a vehicle weigh-in-motion system now being deployed at military facilities worldwide to speed U.S. air deployments. He also invented a system that remotely monitors the security of special nuclear materials using optical fibers, a technology now in use at U.S. nuclear storage facilities. Jeff’s last invention at ORNL was hybrid solar lighting systems. He served as the Vice President of Research with Sunlight Direct, Inc. – an energy technology company that spun the technology out of ORNL in 2004. During his tenure at ORNL, Jeff was named Engineer/Scientist of the Year in 1997 and Science Communicator of the Year in 2004.
In 2005, Jeff’s perspective on life changed dramatically when he served as an energy and science policy advisor in the U.S. Senate. He drafted several provisions included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and led initial staff-level efforts for U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander, who served as a congressional catalyst for launching President Bush’s American Competitiveness and Advanced Energy Initiatives while Jeff was on his staff. Jeff’s most important take away messages from a year on Capitol Hill were that: a) America’s energy problem is not going away anytime soon, b) consensus top-level national energy goals were both lacking and needed to guide future research, and c) politicians were relying on researchers like him to innovate America out of its energy problem rather than enact mandates.
Jeff received his B.S. in Electro-Optics from the University of Houston in 1986.
