Far left, Office of Research Education Director Moody Altamimi announces the 2025 winners. From left, ORNL’s Luis Caicedo Torres, Spenser Cox, Maria Mahbub, and Bryan Conry enjoy their moment in the spotlight. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
Maria Mahbub, a staff scientist in the Cyber Resilience and Intelligence Division at the Department of Energy Oak Ridge National Laboratory, recently earned second place and the People’s Choice Award in ORNL’s 2025 Your Science in a Nutshell competition, a lightning-round challenge that tasks early career researchers with distilling their complex research into three-minute talks for general audiences.
Mahbub’s presentation, The DNA Whisper Catcher: Predicting Lung Cancer Before It Strikes, spotlighted her team’s development of an interpretable artificial intelligence model that predicts lung cancer risk with up to 98% accuracy, using only a person’s genomic data. The work leverages a transformer-based architecture, the same kind of AI model behind ChatGPT, to analyze patterns in the DNA of over 30,000 veterans.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could listen to the silent signals in our DNA, and predict who’s at risk before cancer grows?” Mahbub said in her talk. “That’s exactly what we set out to do.”
Mahbub, who earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and has a background in multimodal data processing and explainable AI, emphasized not only the model’s accuracy but also its transparency, offering clinicians the “why” behind each prediction.
“Taking part in Your Science in a Nutshell was a great opportunity to refine how I communicate complex research,” Mahbub said. “Winning second place and the People’s Choice award was incredibly meaningful, but what moved me the most was hearing from people whose loved ones have battled cancer. Their messages reminded me that behind every dataset are real lives.”
The Nutshell competition has become a signature event at ORNL, connecting early career scientists with communications mentors to help hone their storytelling skills. Winners are invited to a celebratory lunch with ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer and Deputy for Science and Technology Susan Hubbard.
Mahbub’s work exemplifies the mission of ORNL’s National Security Sciences Directorate: transforming data into foresight and innovation that secures the nation and its citizens.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.
