David Weston has been drawn to the natural world since he was a child exploring a small forest near his home.

Turning that fascination into a science career, he has examined topics such as plant genomics and the relationship between plants and the organisms in their environment. Weston has bachel...

What does condensed matter physics have in common with hitchhiking around the world? For ORNL’s Zac Ward, the answers would include “new experiences” and “uncomfortable challenges.” Ward discovered physics after earning a bachelor’s degree in English literature, teaching a year in Japan, and doin...

David Green learned an important lesson about hard work as he pursued a bachelor’s degree at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Namely, if he put in the effort to understand a difficult subject, that subject became less difficult and was sometimes even fun. The subject at hand was physics,...

The new DOE Center for Bioenergy Innovation led by ORNL is focused on accelerating the development of specialty plants and microbial systems to support a biobased economy. 

As a young girl Kelly Chipps believed she would become a field biologist. Then, in her junior year of high school, she studied physics with a teacher so in love with the subject that Chipps fell in love with it, too. She dropped biology in her senior year, opting to take a more advanced, calculus-ba...

ORNL is proud of its role in fostering the next generation of scientists and engineers. We bring in talented young researchers, team them with accomplished scientists and engineers, and put them to work at the lab’s one-of-a-kind facilities. The result is research that makes us proud and prepares th...

A thermoplastic-based composite feedstock known as carbon fiber–ABS is the workhorse of polymer-composite 3D printing at DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, located at ORNL.

It was the material that created the first 3D-printed car (the Strati), one of the first 3D-printed buildings (the ...