Brian H. Davison is a Corporate Fellow and Chief Scientist for Systems Biology and Biotechnology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is the Chief Science Officer for the Center For Bioenergy Innovation from 2017-present. He was the Science Coordinator in the DOE Bioenergy Science Center from 2007 to 2017. He is the PI for the ongoing DOE-BER project on “Visualization of Solvent Disruption of Biomass and Biomembrane Structures in the Production of Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts”. He is an Adjunct Professor of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He was Director of Life Sciences Division at ORNL (2004-2005). In his thirty-eight years at ORNL, he performed biotechnology research including bioconversion of renewable resources (ethanol, organic acids, solvents), non-aqueous biocatalysis, extractive fermentations, biomass conversion and characterization, catalytic upgrading of ethanol into fuels and economic analyses of the same. He has 188+ publications and 17 patents. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, and his B.S.E. in Chemical Engineering, from the University of Rochester.
He led a multilab team which received an R&D100 Award in 1997 for “Production of Chemicals from Biologically Derived Succinic Acid,” a process ultimately licensed by BioAmber. He helped invent and develop an ethanol upgrading technology to produce renewable hydrocarbon fuels which was licensed by Vertimass, LLC (vertimass.com). He received the ORNL Technology Transfer award (2018) for these and other efforts. He was the ORNL Science Communicator of 2010 for efforts in bioenergy and education. He co-chaired the 15th to 26th Symposia on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals. He co-founded the "Commercializing Industrial Biotechnology" meeting in 2015. He was organizer or participant in over 15 USDOE workshops and roadmap reports, including co-organizing the significant "Breaking the Barriers to Cellulosic Ethanol" Workshop in 2005 [DOE/SC-0095]. He received the 2006 C.D. Scott award by the Society of Industrial Microbiology. He is a Fellow of AIChE, SIMB, and AIMBE.
He was on the Board of Directors of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering (AIChE), 2020-2022. He is on the Board of the AIChE Society for Biological Engineering. He co-founded the ORNL LGBTQ+ group now called PRISM at ORNL in 1995 and serves as spokesperson and co-chair to promote nondiscrimination and benefit policy changes. He is the co-chair of the ORNL Educational Research Committee since formed in 2021 as the latest aspect of his commitment to mentoring.
He is chair of the ORNL Institutional Biosafety Committee since 2002.