Stewardship Award | MARY ANN PIETTE
Stewardship Award: Nomination Summary (2026)
Brief description of achievements/contributions
Mary Ann merits this for her efforts to establish positive working relationships with DOE’s new Applied Energy Offices to meet the unprecedented transition that began with the 2025 sunsetting of the long-standing EERE and the establishment of CMEI. Coming after more than 30 years of a stable and productive partnership, this shift marked a profound change. With no playbook for how to respond, Mary Ann devised a strategy to demonstrate the Lab’s continuing value to CMEI and the other applied energy offices, understand the new funding opportunities, and establish partnerships with DOE leadership.
Why exceptional? What has been its impact?
She opened funding opportunities for many of the ETA’s original EERE programs, e.g., ETA received more than $20M from CMEI’s Industrial Tech Office to lead three major initiatives that strengthen U.S. industrial competitiveness through energy innovation.
Her efforts to ensure that CMEI understood the value of the Lab’s long-lived successful and innovative research served to strengthen one of the Lab’s most consequential mission areas: the development of affordable, reliable, secure, and abundant energy systems.
Why should the committee recognize this achievement?
…because the DOE reorganization represented an unprecedented disruption to one of its most consequential mission area. EERE’s dissolution, along with the development of nascent applied energy organizations, created uncertainty that threatened our core applied research enterprise. Her ongoing presence in D.C. has been instrumental in advocating for the Lab, educating new leadership, and safeguarding both people and funding during a time of heightened uncertainty. The result of her work over the last year is that DOE has realized that the Lab has valuable expertise in a range of research areas that match their new priorities, from geothermal subsurface work to the analysis of data center energy usage.
PROPOSED CITATION (limit 40 words):