Babu Chalamala

Babu Chalamala is currently a Senior Scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. Earlier, he was Head of the Energy Storage Technology and Systems Department and Program Manager for Grid Energy Storage at the laboratory for eight years. Prior to joining Sandia in 2015, he was a Corporate Fellow at MEMC Electronic Materials for five years, where led R&D and product development in grid energy storage technologies. Before that, he founded two startup companies, Indocel Technologies commercializing large format lithium batteries and Stellarray commercializing digital x-ray sources. Earlier, as a research staff member at Motorola and Texas Instruments, he made significant contributions to vacuum microelectronics and flat panel display technologies. In 2024, he was elected as member of the US National Academy of Engineering.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the National Academy of Inventors. He served as Chair of the IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Energy Storage and Stationary Battery Committee. He currently serves as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE PES. As chair of the IEEE Photonics Society Technical Committee on Displays, he was instrumental in launching the IEEE/OSA Journal of Display Technology. He has been an active member of the Materials Research Society and served as co-chair of the 2006 MRS Fall Meeting. He was a guest editor of the MRS Bulletin, Proceedings of the IEEE, and the IEEE Journal on Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics and served on the editorial boards of the Proceedings of the IEEE, IEEE Access, and the Energy Storage Journal. He is currently a Senior Editor of IEEE Access and serves as Lead Editor for the Cambridge University Press series on Grid Energy Storage. He received the ESIG Technical Excellence Award in 2023, IEEE Mortan Antler Lecture Award in 2018, and the James B. Eads Engineering Award of the Academy of Sciences St Louis in 2015. He has a B.Tech in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Sri Venkateswara University and his PhD degree in Physics from the University of North Texas. He authored over 130 papers and received 9 US patents.