Dr. Michael Pacheco joined NREL in January of 2003 to serve as the Director of the National Bioenergy Center (NBC.) The NBC was established by the Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) in 2000 and is headquartered at NREL. As Center Director, Dr. Pacheco provides strategic guidance, technical direction, and management oversight of the NBC. In addition to line management responsibility at NREL, Dr. Pacheco is also responsible for coordinating bioenergy research activities supported by DOE and carried out at 5 DOE Laboratories: NREL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Idaho National Energy & Environmental Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory.

Dr. Pacheco joined NREL from Louisiana-Pacific Corp., where he served as Manager of Oriented Strand Board Technology and Product Quality and a Corporate Engineering Fellow for four years in Portland, Oregon. Before joining Louisiana-Pacific, Dr. Pacheco was a Vice President at Energy BioSystems Corp in Houston, Texas, where he led Process Development efforts to commercialize a bio-catalytic process for desulfurizing petroleum diesel and gasoline. Earlier, Dr. Pacheco held numerous supervisory positions in R&D during 16 years in the petrochemical industry, working for Amoco Oil Corp. and Conoco Oil Co. He earned a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, and a B.S. in chemical engineering from Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.