Hubs, Centers, and Institutes

The Climate Change Science Institute was formed in 2009 to integrate climate science activities across ORNL. CCSI’s priorities are to create the science, experiments, data, and community capacity needed to:

- Strengthen the predictive capabilities and effectiveness of climate and biogeochemical models.
- Identify and understand how extreme events and climate tipping points impact the resiliency of human and natural land-energy-water systems.
- Participate in national and international climate assessments and response option analysis.
- Develop useful climate adaptation and mitigation tools and information in collaboration with land-energy-water system stakeholders.

UT-ORII is creating the model to build bridges between education, national laboratories and industry in areas of critical national and world need. Leveraging a strong alliance between UT and ORNL that dates back to the Manhattan Project, UT-ORII is uniquely capable of introducing K-12 students to STEM careers and training PhD scholars and building teams of UT and ORNL researchers to tackle some of America’s most challenging research needs.

The Critical Materials Innovation Hub will focus on technologies that will make better use of the materials we have access to as well as eliminate the need for materials that are subject to supply disruptions.

The Center for Bioenergy Innovation's vision is to accelerate domestication of bioenergy-relevant plants and microbes to enable high-impact, value-added, co-product development at multiple points in the bioenergy supply chain.

The Quantum Science Center, led by ORNL, was established to realize the potential of topological quantum materials for manipulating, transferring and storing quantum information. Quantum materials exhibit exotic properties under specific conditions, and the center will transition this knowledge to the private sector for use in practical applications such as quantum computers and sensors.

The Energy Frontier Research Centers program aims to accelerate such transformative discovery, combining the talents and creativity of our national scientific workforce with a powerful new generation of tools for penetrating, understanding, and manipulating matter on the atomic and molecular scales. ORNL is home to one of the DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers, the Fast and Cooperative Ion Transport in Polymer-Based Electrolytes (FaCT). The goal of FaCT is to understand and control fast, correlated ion and proton transport at multiple length and time scales in polymer-based electrolytes. 

The Shull Wollan Center promotes worldwide neutron scattering collaboration among researchers in biological and life sciences, energy sciences, polymer science, condensed matter physics, and computational sciences.

The Center for BioEnergy Sustainability (CBES) is a leading resource for dealing with the potential impacts of biomass production for conversion to biofuels and bio-based products.

CMB performs research at the interface of biological, environmental, physical, computational and neutron sciences.

The Grid Research Innovation and Development Center (GRID-C) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory combines multiple electrification research activities across the utility, buildings, and vehicle space into one 52,000 sq. ft. facility.