During a visit to the lab in August, DHS S&T staff learned about ORNL's unique identity science research and biometric capabilities. Credit: Eric Swanson/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
ORNL welcomed visitors from DHS S&T for tours and discussions
Last month, Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted visitors from the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate to better understand the laboratory’s facilities and research expertise and how it applies to homeland security missions.
ORNL partners with DHS on several national and homeland security projects — such as support for FEMA’s disaster response efforts — and the lab’s science capabilities could benefit several additional DHS missions.
“ORNL and S&T continue to be an extremely effective team. We’re communicating constantly,” said Tim O’Connor, acting director of DHS S&T’s Office of National Labs. “In doing so, we’ve managed to collaborate quickly and effectively to deliver technical solutions to DHS components. Being able to pick up the phone and work out a tough question in real-time is a particularly important quality of our relationship and our people’s ability to cooperate.”
The August visit focused on ORNL’s multidisciplinary research in several areas critical to DHS missions: biological and environmental systems, cyber science, biometrics, remote sensing, advanced manufacturing and critical infrastructure resilience.
“Our multidisciplinary research across a broad variety of disciplines here at ORNL can contribute to solving DHS’s mission challenges,” said ORNL's Craig Moss, program director for Defense and Homeland Security. “The more we can connect our researchers with end users like DHS, the more we’ll be able to deliver key solutions in homeland security.”
ORNL’s foundational research into biological and environmental systems, for example, could support S&T’s Food, Agriculture, and Veterinary Defense program. To highlight these capabilities, ORNL biosecurity programs lead David Graham and Mindy Clark of the Biosciences Division provided a tour of ORNL’s Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory, which offers a suite of imaging capabilities more diverse than any other plant phenotyping systems worldwide.
Other tour stops included:
- the new Cyber Science Research Facility and its Embedded Systems Security lab, Cyber Operations Research Range and Industrial Control Systems testbed;
- the biometric range for researching identity sciences, where the group witnessed a demonstration of a facial recognition technology that is currently being commercialized through DHS’s Commercialization Accelerator Program;
- Tycho Station, ORNL’s recently commissioned small satellite ground station that is reducing the time from data collection to actional information in the hand of decision makers during disasters; and
- the Grid Research Integration and Deployment Center, which houses multiple electrification research activities across the utilities, microgrids, buildings and vehicle spaces.
The DHS team left with more than just a better understanding of the laboratory’s capabilities and facilities — the visit is already delivering results.
“We have a potential answer to a component ‘hard question,’ a follow-on action for a collaborative project, and an opportunity to align research agendas,” O’Connor said. “Outstanding efforts by all involved.”
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, please visit energy.gov/science.
