R&D World announces 2026 R&D 100 Professional Award Winners

 

R&D World has announced the winners of the 2026 R&D 100 Professional Awards. The list of 2026 winners follows, along with highlights from their nomination letters.

These winners will be formally awarded at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet at the Hyatt Scottsdale, AZ on November 19, 2025.

R&D Leader of the Year

Kumar Sanketh, R&D director of Functional Polymers product R&D within Packaging, Specialty Plastics and Hydrocarbons at Dow Inc., is the 2026 R&D 100 Leader of the Year.

Sanketh leads a global product R&D organization of more than 110 employees at six sites across the Americas, Europe and China. He supports business portfolios that drive more than $6 billion in annual revenue.

Sanketh joined Dow in 2007 as associate scientist and later worked as a research scientist, application materials science leader and technical service and development manager. His historical technical work spans polyurethane coatings, functional packaging, photovoltaic encapsulation, infrastructure materials and high-performance polymers for wire and cable applications.

Early in his Dow career, Sanketh helped develop a class of polyolefin photovoltaic encapsulation resins. The resins have grown to more than 300 million pounds in annual sales. Sanketh has since moved from individual research roles into the leadership of multidisciplinary product-development organizations.

Sanketh has contributed to several R&D 100-winning products through his own technical work and the teams he has led. They include ENGAGE PV Polyolefin Resins, a 2018 winner for photovoltaic encapsulation; ELVALOY RET MF 1177, a 2022 winner used to incorporate recycled plastic into asphalt pavement; and DOW ENDURANCE HFDD-4201, a 2023 winner for high-voltage and extra-high-voltage cable insulation.

Sanketh is an author or co-author of more than 15 peer-reviewed publications and a co-inventor on more than 15 patent applications, according to his résumé. His research has covered polymer physics, adhesion and friction, photopolymerization, coatings and photovoltaic materials.

His work outside his immediate organization includes serving as a board member and councilor for the Society of Plastics Engineers South Texas Chapter and as an industrial advisory board member for the Akron Polymer Innovation Cluster. He has also worked with Third Pillar Solar on a memorandum of understanding covering materials support and lifecycle data for floating photovoltaic systems on industrial water bodies.

Sanketh earned a doctorate in polymer science and a master’s degree in polymer engineering from the University of Akron. He also completed a graduate leadership certificate at Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business.

R&D Researcher of the Year

M. Parans Paranthaman, distinguished corporate fellow in the Chemical Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is the 2026 R&D 100 Researcher of the Year.

Paranthaman joined ORNL in 1993 and has worked across materials chemistry, energy storage, high-temperature superconductors, permanent magnets, critical-material recovery and advanced manufacturing. He also holds a joint appointment as a professor and graduate adviser at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education.

His early work on high-temperature superconductors produced materials and manufacturing methods licensed for commercial wire production. American Superconductor became the sixth U.S. company to license ORNL’s RABiTS technology in 2000. Later ORNL technologies he co-invented were licensed to Samsung Electronics and Carlex Glass America for superhydrophobic glass coatings, and to Marc-Antoni Racing for fast-charging lithium-ion battery components. His innovations have been licensed to more than a dozen companies.

More recently, Paranthaman led research on recovering lithium from brines, mining waste and recycled battery materials. In 2024, seven ORNL lithium-recovery technologies were licensed to Element3, a Texas company working to extract lithium from wastewater produced by oil and gas operations. That year, Paranthaman and collaborators received an R&D 100 Award for high-capacity sorbents for direct lithium extraction.

Paranthaman’s 2026 nomination materials list more than 500 peer-reviewed publications, 65 issued U.S. patents and more than 110 inventions. His Google Scholar profile had more than 28,200 citations and an h-index of 83 when reviewed in July/August 2026.

He has received nine R&D 100 Awards between 1999 and 2024 for work involving lithium-ion battery electrodes, additive manufacturing of permanent magnets, high-performance superconductor wires, gallium nitride power electronics, superhydrophobic coatings and direct lithium extraction. His other honors include the UT-Battelle Inventor of the Year Award, ORNL’s Director’s Award for Science and Technology and ORNL Top Scientist of the Year. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, American Physical Society, Materials Research Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Ceramic Society, ASM International and Institute of Physics.

Mentorship has also been a sustained part of Paranthaman’s work. His résumé lists more than 180 people whom he has mentored or co-advised, including doctoral and master’s students, postdoctoral researchers, undergraduates, college teachers and high school teachers. He received an Outstanding U.S. Department of Energy Mentor Award covering 2006 through 2008 and has participated in ORNL early-career and internship programs.

Paranthaman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemistry from Madurai Kamaraj University and a doctorate in materials science and solid-state chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Before joining ORNL, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Colorado Boulder. He has served as an editor of the Journal of Alloys and Compounds and as associate editor of the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

 R&D Technician of the Year

Cody Somers, lead technician at Kennametal, Inc., is the 2026 R&D 100 Technician of the Year. Having worked at the industrial technology and manufacturing company Kennametal since 2015, Somers has more than a decade of hands-on experience with tungsten carbide manufacturing processes.

At Kennametal, Somers serves as a lead operator for multiple industrial-scale additive-manufacturing systems. He supports at least three binder jet printers and three high-temperature furnaces and works across the full production sequence, from build preparation through curing, depowdering and sintering. He has also supported the development of KAF82, a cemented carbide material. Somers also helped move new additive materials and processes from development into practical use.

His broader technical experience includes ball milling, pressing, sintering, extrusion, injection molding, binder jet additive manufacturing and quality control.

His equipment troubleshooting helped reduce downtime by approximately 40%. A former manager in Kennametal’s Additive Manufacturing R&D Lab notes that Somers introduced approaches that reduced sintering cycle time by 30% and cut printing time in half while improving part quality and consistency. Somers’s résumé also attributes a 50% reduction in labor cost to process-improvement work.

Somers entered the additive-manufacturing group with carbide-processing and sintering experience but no prior additive-manufacturing background, according to a supporting letter from his former manager. The letter explains how Somers became the team’s resident expert in additive manufacturing of tungsten carbide and helped develop materials used to produce components that could not be made with traditional methods. Another supporting letter from a Kennametal colleague details how Somers’s knowledge of printer operation and troubleshooting led the printer manufacturer to contact him directly for technical input on complex equipment problems.

Somers studied criminal justice and machining at Westmoreland County Community College. His résumé lists training in machining, AutoCAD, tool design, CNC operation, maintenance, and inspection and quality control, as well as recognition on the college’s President’s and Dean’s lists.