People with purpose power ORNL

Uniquely powerful scientific instruments don’t sustain global leadership without a diverse research and technical staff from across disciplines, ready to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.

“We have amazing facilities, but we also make sure we have the programs and opportunities expected by the people leading our extraordinary research,” said Mardell Sours, ORNL’s director of human resources. “Everyone wants to work for an organization that values its people and pursues solutions for the good of humanity—and that's what we do at ORNL.”

Sours’ team works with the lab’s scientific leadership to identify and recruit the most talented professionals in their fields, to support development of staff members across the lab, and to provide the “total rewards” they expect—not only in compensation and traditional benefits but in growth opportunities, training, flexible work arrangements and amenities such as an on-site medical clinic and fitness center.

She views diversity and inclusion as vital ingredients in fulfilling the lab’s science and technology mission. “Diverse and inclusive organizations are more innovative, productive, safe, collegial, and enjoyable places to work,” she said.

In the next few years, ORNL aims to hire up to 1,000 more new employees.

“We are taking a much more proactive approach to meeting the talent needs of the lab,” said Gary Worrell, ORNL’s lead talent acquisition partner. “We have partnered with every organization across the lab to identify talent needs; we are collaborating with more organizations like Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the Society of Women Engineers, and our talented team of recruiters is working closely with hiring managers to ensure we find diverse, high-quality talent—people who aspire to the science mission of ORNL.”

In addition, recruiters are working to improve the recruitment experience.

“Whether or not a person gets the job, I want them to say, 'I had a really good time meeting the team. I learned a lot, and I would love to work there someday,'” said ORNL recruiter Stephanie Baird. “I want ORNL to be set apart, not just in terms of our research excellence, but in how we treat people. Each person is important—they're not just another name in a pool of applicants.”

This new approach has led to an increase in the volume and diversity of applicants. Most notably, the applicant pool has increased from an average of roughly 15,000 a year to over 50,000 in 2019.

Cultivating promising undergrads

Moody Altamimi, ORNL's director of research excellence, oversees efforts to offer underrepresented minority students the opportunity to develop skills that will enable them to pursue advanced degrees in science and engineering. She makes it clear that the ultimate goal of the lab's involvement with organizations like the National Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, Inc. (GEM) Consortium is finding and encouraging exceptional talent.

“These are high-quality, carefully selected students who just happen to be diverse,” Altamimi said. “I have been working with GEM students for two years, and our goal has been to engage with them as early as possible. We want to move the process upstream by identifying talented candidates early on and inviting them to spend the summer doing research at the laboratory.

“Our long-term strategy is to provide these students with a successful internship experience that encourages them to consider the laboratory as a potential employer or collaborator.”

Building faculty relationships

Another way the lab identifies promising students is by building relationships with their teachers. That's the thinking behind the HBCU Minority Educational Institution (MEI) Faculty Summer Research Program at ORNL. The lab sponsors summer research appointments for faculty at HBCUs and MEIs, with an eye toward increasing research collaborations and fostering long-term relationships between ORNL research staff and faculty members.

“You can tell professors and university leadership teams how amazing ORNL is all you want,” Altamimi said, “but to really appreciate the laboratory, they have to come and see it. When the Faculty Summer Research Program participants were here last summer, we created an environment that enabled them to engage with our science and technology staff, and they were blown away by the opportunities that were available, as well as by the incredible science that takes place here.”

Faculty members are also asked to identify one or two students who could come to ORNL for an internship over the summer.

“Typically, the summer research experience gives students the confidence and the desire to go on to get a Ph.D.,” Altamimi said. “The research produced by undergraduate students who have had internships at any national lab is much more mature, much more refined, so their Ph.D. applications are naturally stronger.” We know they will hit the ground running when they get into a Ph.D. program.”

Developing leadership potential

In addition to recruiting talented individuals, ORNL puts a premium on developing the potential of staff members throughout their careers at the laboratory.

Eric Benson, an organizational development and training consultant at ORNL, designs, develops and delivers training programs that promote individual and organizational improvement.

“Our goal is to enhance performance,” Benson said. “Performance is a combination of our relationships and our results. The programs we provide help people to get along and get great things done.”

One of the laboratory's most effective training courses has been the Developing Leadership Potential program.

“To be a leader in science, you need to demonstrate a mastery of science,” Benson said. "But being a leader of scientists requires learning to lead in a different way. It requires a mastery of working with and motivating people. That's what Developing Leadership Potential is all about.”

The weeks-long program is conducted once a year for about 20 people. To attend the course, individuals must be nominated by their manager.

“We ask managers to consider whether these individuals are on a succession plan, whether they are up-and-comers, whether they have demonstrated an exceptional level of performance and are looking to take on larger leadership roles,” Benson said.

“It's a wonderful opportunity for them to begin to network with people who will be on the same leadership level. They forge bonds with one another, so there's good collaboration across the lab, not only from a scientific standpoint, but also when they need to discuss a situation or get advice.

“We're seeing an uptick in participation in all of our programs, so the professional development opportunities at the lab are being taken advantage of more and more. We're encouraged by it, and we'd like to see the numbers continue to increase.”

Attracting world-class early-career scientists

Another of the many tools the laboratory uses to attract top next-generation scientists is research fellowships. For example, the Liane B. Russell Fellowship, named for the groundbreaking ORNL geneticist, attracts world-class, early-career researchers from all fields of science and engineering. The fellowship's three-year appointments allow recipients to conduct high-quality research with the goal of pursuing long-term careers at ORNL.

One recent recipient, Christa Brelsford, works in ORNL's Human Dynamics Group. She says that the fellowship has given her the opportunity to build a collaborative network across the national lab system while still maintaining her strong connections to academia.

Brelsford has been studying the concept of “community detection” and trying to develop tools to measure how social systems interact with physical systems.

“For example,” she said, “Suppose a hurricane hits a major city—where do the people go? In an emergency, we need to understand both the vulnerabilities of the physical infrastructure like roads, transportation systems, power and water, and we also need to understand how people make choices. People are not just going to uniformly move to the next closest community. People go to other cities. People go to places where they have relationships and contacts and community.”

Brelsford noted that, historically, researchers haven't had very good tools for measuring or understanding how these choices are made.

“This idea of community detection is a very early-stage effort to try to answer these questions by using publicly available data from Twitter that contains geographic information—like place names and, occasionally, GPS-type information,” she said. “That gives us information about where people are tweeting from and where the tweets are directed to.”

By accumulating these social media interactions, Brelsford and her colleagues can begin to build pictures of communities whose boundaries are defined by person-to-person interactions, rather than by lines on a map. Eventually, she hopes that this knowledge can be applied to helping cities determine where people are likely to go in the event of a natural disaster and to apply that knowledge to infrastructure and emergency planning.

“I have always considered the purpose of a scientific career to be doing good in the world,” Brelsford said. “So the guiding, practical question of my work is: 'Is this going to help? Is it going to make somebody's life better?' I'm not a classical economist or a classical geographer or a classical anybody. I have always been prone to saying, 'That's a cool question; I'm going to work on that.' And if I don't have the expertise to answer the questions myself, I go find a collaborator who does. This fellowship at ORNL has allowed me to pursue that kind of research and to build those kinds of relationships.”