Features

Rare earth elements are the “secret sauce” of numerous advanced materials for energy, transportation, defense and communications applications.

Early career scientist Stephanie Galanie has applied her expertise in synthetic biology to a number of challenges in academia and private industry. She’s now bringing her skills in high-throughput bio- and analytical chemistry to accelerate research on feedstock crops as a Liane B. Russell Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Mammalian genetics pioneer Liane B. Russell died Saturday, July 20. She was 95. Lee, as she was known to friends and colleagues, arrived in Oak Ridge in 1947 with her husband, William L. Russell, to study radiation-induced health effects using mice, which are genetically similar to humans.

In Hong Wang’s world, nothing is beyond control. Before joining Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a senior distinguished researcher in transportation systems, he spent more than three decades studying the control of complex industrial systems in the United Kingdom. 

Just minutes after taking one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind, Neil Armstrong deviated from NASA’s meticulously crafted flight plan for the Apollo 11 mission. According to NASA’s lunar surface operations plan, Armstrong’s top priority after his famous first steps should have been to immediately take a contingency sample—a small sample of soil—to provide scientists at least a piece of the moon if the mission had to be abandoned early.

Sometimes solutions to the biggest problems can be found in the smallest details. The work of biochemist Alex Johs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory bears this out, as he focuses on understanding protein structures and molecular interactions to resolve complex global problems like the spread of mercury pollution in waterways and the food supply.

Scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland are using neutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to capture new information about DNA and RNA molecules and enable more accurate computer simulations of how they interact with everything from proteins to viruses.

In the shifting landscape of global manufacturing, American ingenuity is once again giving U.S companies an edge with radical productivity improvements as a result of advanced materials and robotic systems developed at the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

An organic chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Santa Jansone-Popova focuses on the fundamental challenges of chemical separations that translate to world-changing solutions for clean water and sustainable energy.

With operating licenses for nearly all nuclear power plants set to expire in the 2030s and 40s—a pending loss that would affect a fifth of the country’s electricity supply—U.S. utilities will need to find a way to respond to what has been called the “nuclear cliff.”