National Innovator of the Year Awarded to PNNL Advanced Metals Manufacturing Leader

RICHLAND, Wash.—The National Academy of Inventors and the Department of Energy have selected Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Scott Whalen as DOE National Innovator of the Year. Whalen, a prolific inventor with 23 granted and 13 pending U.S. patents, is a mechanical engineer by training and an inventor by sheer force of will.

His signature patented achievement, Shear Assisted Processing and Extrusion, or ShAPE™, uses extreme deformation to transform solid metal feedstocks directly into useful machined parts without melting them. Whalen co-developed ShAPE™, which transforms scrap metal into high-value products.

The inventions, Whalen is quick to note, grew out of earlier PNNL work on metals extrusion and materials processing. He credits teamwork for the success of each invention.

“There’s not one patent where I am a sole inventor,” he said. “It’s the culture of PNNL to bring together a talented team with different skills and perspectives to solve problems.”

Nonetheless, Whalen has developed the skills to lead these teams. The Inventor of the Year award is his third such national accolade. He was named a Distinguished Inventor by Battelle, which operates PNNL for DOE, in 2025. Before that, he was PNNL’s Inventor of the Year in 2023. His teams have received two R&D 100 Awards, which annually recognize the most significant technology innovations of the year. 

The DOE Innovator of the Year nominations are open to all DOE employees, its 17 national laboratories, and other DOE sites. The prestigious award, only the third to be bestowed, is the second to be awarded to a PNNL inventor. In 2024, PNNL’s Ji-Guang (Jason) Zhang was the first honoree for his battery research.

The award was created by DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization together with the National Academy of Inventors to recognize and encourage the rapid transition of innovations from DOE to the real world. Whalen was honored at the National Academy of Inventors ceremony on June 3, 2026, in Los Angeles. 

From lab to market with ShAPE™

Whalen’s impact has not simply been built on ideas or patents. It was built on making ideas practical for industry. His inventions have succeeded where manufacturing innovations often stumble in scale up to industrial-scale processes. He does this by listening closely to industry partners. That “real world” orientation has been central since early in his career, when a project with automotive supplier Magna helped shape his thinking around industrial relevance.

“You have to develop trusted relationships within partner companies who are willing to disclose to you their actual problems,” said Whalen. “They need to know you are going to keep their issues confidential and come up with solutions that matter on an industrial scale. That takes finesse, delivering on things that you promise, and being honest and transparent.”

ShAPE™ has crossed that gap, moving beyond bench-scale curiosity to a technology demonstrated at production-relevant scale. That matters because it means U.S. manufacturers can adopt the technology in energy, transportation, defense and building infrastructure.

The ShAPE™ enterprise

Begun in earnest in 2016, ShAPE has grown well beyond a single technology or project. Enabled by support from DOE, it has matured into a portfolio of dozens of efforts exploring new materials, new product forms, and new industry collaborations. Whalen has helped position the technology for commercialization, working with key partners in PNNL’s Office of Collaboration and Commercialization to transfer the technology into factories and supply chains.

“From ShAPE’s inception, our commercialization managers worked closely with Scott and his team, handling patent and market analyses, intellectual property strategy, funding, awards and ongoing commercialization planning,” said Christina Lomasney-Mattis, Chief Commercialization Officer at PNNL. “This partnership allowed ShAPE to flourish in the commercialization space, leading to over 50 patents, 20 partners and 30 active projects that translate research innovations into impact.”

In 2026, the research has moved into national security applications, adapting the approach to help address challenges in semiconducting materials. It’s the same inventive mindset applied in a new arena: identify a bottleneck, reimagine the process and engineer a path that is both technically sound and scalable.

Whalen is just getting started. With more than 30 projects in the works, there are many inventions still to come. But what drives him?

“We export over 4 billion pounds per year of aluminum scrap, and I want to see U.S. jobs created that use ShAPE to recycle this precious resource within our domestic manufacturing ecosystem,” he said. “I have a personal passion around the topic. I want to keep inventing on this and protecting it for our country.”

Whalen received his mechanical engineering undergraduate degree from the University of Idaho, a master’s from Texas A&M University and his PhD from Washington State University. After eight years at Sandia National Laboratories, he joined PNNL in 2012. He is currently chief scientist in the Applied Materials and Manufacturing group, where he leads the Thermomechanical Processing team.