Profile
Anyone who owns a car knows that gasoline is expensive, and that its price and availability depends largely on the volatile Middle East. Though the predictions differ, we all agree that oil will eventually be consumed, and that the emissions from burning gasoline are harmful to the environment. In short, our method for powering our vehicles needs to change.
Full Story
Feature
How many people have the opportunity to direct a brand new, multi-billion dollar center? Forty-six, with a new energy initiative from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The initiative is establishing 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs) at universities, national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and private institutions.
Full Story
30 Seconds or Less
“Research is always risky. Research doesn’t work in a linear way. So you cannot say, if we invest in here, and then we do that, and then we do that, and then we have this or that. It works differently. Research is a lot like the lottery. You have to have a lot of people working on it, work in different directions, work on different problems, come with different ideas, and a little bit of good luck needs to be there in order to find the right solution.”
– Claus Daniel
Opportunities for Employment, Students/Faculty, and Fellowships
Choosing a career? Consider coming to ORNL! Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the Department of Energy’s largest science and energy laboratory. As an international leader in a range of scientific areas that support the Department of Energy’s mission, ORNL has six major mission roles: neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology, materials science at the nanoscale, and national security. With funding in excess of $1 billion and a staff of four thousand, we are one of the world's foremost research centers and one of the United States' largest national laboratories.
For more information about working at ORNL, please visit our web site at: http://jobs.ornl.gov/. To find Postdoc positions or educational opportunities, look under “Additional Opportunities”
Claus Daniel
Double Feature: EFRCs
“Where do all the elements that make up our bodies and our world come from?” 
Simultaneous axial and radial epitaxies have many applications. However, until recently they eluded researchers. Scientists, including three from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have now demonstrated the realization of simultaneous axial and radial epitaxies by growing ZnO microtowers through a regrowth technique of repeating the same growth cycle (loading the source material, heating, growing, cooling, exposing to air, and repeating) 2-10 times inside a well-controlled tube-furnace system. 
In the search for an energy carrier for renewable energy, hydrogen has great appeal. It is both abundant and environmentally friendly. There is a problem, however: currently, there is no way to store the hydrogen with high gravimetric and volumetric densities. Without this density, the hydrogen will take up too much room to be practical. 
Lignin is the second most abundant naturally occurring biopolymer found in vascular plants, and is a byproduct of making paper. Currently, this byproduct gets burned, but with the proper understanding and development, it could possibly be used as a renewable source of fuel and chemicals. While there is already a significant understanding of the thermal breakdown processes in materials made of carbon and hydrogen, less is known about the thermochemical conversion of materials containing oxygen like lignin.