Event Speakers

Robert Wagner
Director, Fuels Engines and Emissions Research Center
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Dr. Wagner is the Director of the Fuels, Engines, and Emissions Research Center, a Distinguished Member of the technical staff, and serves as the technical lead for engine combustion and efficiency research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His responsibilities include providing technical direction and leadership to a diverse research portfolio for addressing evolving efficiency/emissions challenges in the transportation sector in support of the DOE Office of Vehicle Technologies. He has been principal investigator on numerous DOE and industry funded activities related to combustion, engine controls, thermodynamics, and thermal energy recovery for conventional and bio-renewable fuel applications. Robert is a member of several government/industry technical teams and working groups to provide guidance to DOE in establishing and meeting near- and long-term efficiency goals. Robert is also a member of the Executive Committee of the DOE U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center on Clean Vehicles and the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Engine Research and an Associate Editor of the SAE International Journal of Engines. He has more than 80 technical publications and is often invited to speak on the topics of engine efficiency, advanced combustion, and engine cyclic dispersion phenomena.

Joe Redfield
Principal Engineer
Advanced Vehicle Technology Section
Southwest Research Institute

Joe Redfield specializes in energy systems engineering and has extensive design and project management experience in the development and application of advanced technologies for vehicular propulsion systems. At SwRI, Joe manages and provides engineering leadership to project teams involved in the development and systems integration of electric, hybrid, and plug-in hybrid drive trains including parallel and series hybrid configurations, and advanced vehicular energy storage systems. The vehicles involved in these projects have included passenger car, heavy duty truck, off road equipment, and locomotive.

Joe has been at SwRI for 29 years and has both a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Terry Alger
Assistant Director
Department of Engine and Vehicle Research
Southwest Research Institute

Dr. Alger's formal training is in Mechanical Engineering with an emphasis on Thermal/Fluids Systems. He graduated from the United States Military Academy as a Distinguished Cadet in 1992 and was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army Corps of Engineers, where he served five years before beginning graduate studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Both his master's thesis and doctoral dissertation focused on optical investigations in a direct injection gasoline engine to determine the effect of flow fields and other engine parameters on fuel/air mixing, emissions and performance. Dr. Alger previously worked at Ford Motor Company's Research and Advanced Engineering Division where he developed several new diagnostic capabilities, including PIV based turbulence measurements, a Spontaneous Raman Scattering residual diagnostic and a method for using a borescope to take flow field measurements. He was also heavily involved in the development of Ford's Light Stratified Charge Direct Injection Gasoline Engine. Dr. Alger joined Southwest Research Institute in 2003 in the Advanced Combustion and Emissions section, which he now manages, concentrating on improving engine efficiency and emissions thorough in-cylinder combustion processes and advanced engine technologies. He is also manager of SwRI's HEDGE II consortium, which is focused on improving gasoline engine efficiency through the use of cooled EGR,advanced ignition systems and other efficiency enhancing technologies. Current research interests include topics in ignition systems, abnormal combustion in gasoline engines, boosting systems for advanced gasoline and diesel engines and dual-fuel engine applications. Dr. Alger has been awarded 7 patents and published over forty papers on topics covering engine efficiency and emissions.

Craig Puetz
Systems and Advanced Engineering
Drivetrain Engineering
John Deere Product Engineering Center

Craig graduated from Michigan Technological University in 1975 with degrees in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. He has worked at the John Deere Product Engineering Center in Waterloo, Iowa for more than 35 years on transmissions and powertrains for large agricultural tractors, and for a variety on construction and forestry equipment. He is currently the manager of the Advanced Drivetrain Engineering group, and also actively participates in corporate initiatives to expand Systems Engineering and Design for Six Sigma activities within Deere.