A three-member faculty committee selected Poeppel based on his service as the former head of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory programs in Ceramics and as director of the lab’s former Energy Technology Division.

A total of four alumni were recognized in the inaugural year of acknowledging the significant contributions and achievements of Cornell graduates to the field of materials science and engineering.

Poeppel is a 1964 graduate of Cornell, where he earned a Bachelor of Engineering Physics and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering in 1968. He has been with Argonne for 39 years and is a senior engineer in the Environmental Science Division, where he is responsible for new nuclear reactor licensing projects.

Along with his work in ceramics and the Energy Technology Division, Poeppel has been an invited speaker at numerous meetings and conferences and has initiated collaborative research with at least 25 private companies. As director of the Argonne National Laboratory Pilot Center, he was responsible for developing collaborative research with industry and university partners to improve properties of ceramic superconductors and to assure rapid commercialization of this new technology.

He has more than 200 published works and 20 patents and was the editor-in-chief of the journal Applied Superconductivity.