Transportation researchers from NREL received awards at the 2025 Annual Merit Review meeting for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO).
Each year, VTO presents awards to individuals from partner institutions for contributions to overall program efforts and to recognize research, development, demonstration, and deployment achievements in specific areas.
VTO Lifetime Distinguished Achievement Award – Margo Melendez
Margo Melendez, NREL’s chief transportation technology deployment and integration engineer, was recognized for her dedication to VTO’s Technology Integration (TI) program and her commitment to the Clean Cities and Communities mission. The award noted that “her leadership has formed an essential connection between DOE, NREL, and stakeholders across a wide range of alternative fuel and advanced transportation fields.”
Clean Cities and Communities (CC&C) is a DOE partnership that fosters collaboration and innovation to advance transportation energy choices nationwide. More than 75 DOE-designated CC&C coalitions work in urban, suburban, and rural areas to deliver objective technical expertise based on a unique understanding of local markets. DOE’s VTO facilitates the administration of CC&C through its TI program.
Melendez was recognized by VTO for her more than two decades of serving as a leader in the TI and CC&C national laboratory team. The award honored her work in guiding NREL teams that provide critical technical assistance to the CC&C partnership.
She was also recognized for managing projects as part of a multimillion-dollar effort funded jointly by DOE, the California Energy Commission, and the South Coast Air Quality Management District to advance the state of technology for natural gas vehicles.
“In addition to the technical projects, the partnership among funding agencies to come together to establish common goals was unique,” Melendez said.
She credited the many engineers and researchers at VTO for her success. “Their vision for innovation is inspiring, and their leadership has helped so many Americans, from researchers to vehicle operators,” she said.
VTO Team Award – RouteE and FASTSim
The NREL teams that developed Route Energy Prediction (RouteE) modeling tools and the Future Automotive Systems Technology Simulator (FASTSim) were recognized by VTO for their “remarkable ingenuity, collaboration, impactful contributions, and outstanding technical expertise.” RouteE and FASTSim can be used to minimize energy consumption, simulate powertrains, and estimate the impact of technology improvements on light-, medium-, and heavy-duty vehicles.
The tool development teams were recognized this year for having integrated new research approaches and continued collaborations with external partners, including Google Maps. The team’s work enabled Google Maps’ eco-routing feature.
The award recognized a number of NREL transportation and mobility analysis researchers, including Chad Baker, Robin Steuteville, Nick Reinicke, Jeff Gonder, Shashi Peddireddy, Balashanmuga Priyan Rajamohan, Ananta Shrestha, Kyle Carow, Jake Holden, Rob Fitzgerald, and Josh Hoshiko and former NREL intern Natalie Schultz.
VTO Team Award – Cooperative Driving Automation
Two multilab Cooperative Driving Automation (CDA) projects were awarded VTO Team Awards, including one that involved NREL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory. These CDA projects were recognized for outstanding collaboration between laboratories and projects “to advance the understanding and implementation of CDA.”
In these projects, researchers developed novel software, algorithms, and hardware needed to quantify the energy impacts and the sensitivity on different communication frameworks, as well as for specific CDA and active traffic management (ATM) applications.
CDA enables multiple automobiles or other road vehicles and road users to communicate with one another and take cooperative actions to increase safety and smoothness of travel. The CDA project teams were recognized in particular for their current work on a shared scenario to demonstrate specific CDA controls.
The NREL researchers recognized as part of these projects were transportation energy transition analysis researcher Nick Reinicke and computational science researcher Qichao Wang.
Learn more about NREL’s transportation and mobility research. And sign up for NREL’s transportation and mobility research newsletter, Mobility Matters, to stay current on the latest news.