One mentor. Four futures.

One is considering a career in national security. One wants to work in the aerospace field. One is focused on Formula One racecars, planning an advanced degree in motorsport engineering. And one wants to make the transition from chemical engineering to nuclear.

Their career goals are varied, but these four summer interns at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory share a mentor: Stacy Queern, group leader for the Project Integration and Material Accountability Group (PIMA) in the Isotope Science and Engineering Directorate. As the next generation of the nation’s scientific workforce, they’re building skills and relationships while contributing to real-world projects at the lab as they’re mentored by Queern and other group members.

Interns Tim Kirk, Parker Tigner and Allison Syron are working on projects in Project Integration and Material Accountability, while intern Katherine Miller is assisting with research on the isotope promethium-147, co-mentored by Queern and nuclear engineer Clarice Phelps.

As the interns tackle projects aligned with their interests, they’re also getting broader views of life at a national laboratory through tours, hands-on work and deep conversations with researchers.

“So much is done here, and just realizing the large scale of the work everyone does here and what all goes into making these advancements has been really fascinating to see,” said Miller, who is helping develop a new process to make Pm-147 from neodymium.

A third-year mechanical engineering student at Florida State University, Miller is researching how temperature affects equipment used to separate the closely related rare earth elements promethium and neodymium, which are difficult to separate because of their similarities. She’s using samarium as a stand-in for promethium.

The work is geared toward establishing a reliable method of domestic production for Pm-147, an isotope used in nuclear batteries for long-life, compact power sources. 

“This is important to me because I’m interested in spacecraft technology,” Miller said. “This experience allows me to conduct research that supports reliable power for small instruments in space.” 

Long-term, she’d like to focus on materials for extreme environments, working on heat shields for spacecraft or space radiation shielding.

But graduate school is in her immediate future.

“So just getting to be hands-on in the lab and see what goes into research and conducting experiments and data processing has been a very valuable experience,” she said.

Like Miller, Parker Tigner came to ORNL looking for research experience before grad school. 

Tigner, who just finished a bachelor’s degree in industrial and system engineering at Mississippi State University, already has her career path mapped out. Getting a master’s degree in motorsport engineering at England’s Oxford Brookes University will propel her into a career in race strategy and operations, “managing a car for a race weekend, determining what tires we’ll run, when we’ll do our pit stops, where we want to be on the grid  — things like that,” she said.

As a small child, Tigner “held a flashlight” for her father when he worked on cars, assisting him more as she grew. When she was exposed to engineering in high school, “I started to put together that I could do both: continue my passion for cars and also work in engineering,” Tigner said.

When she started college, Tigner and her father began watching Formula One racing together, and she realized motorsport engineering would be the perfect fit.

“I’m very competitive by nature,” Tigner said, who was on the equestrian team at Mississippi State. “Motorsport engineering kind of combined all my interests.”

Having grown up in Knoxville, she was aware of ORNL.

“I wanted to gain more experience and see more things before I got into a master’s program that was super-niche,” Tigner said. 

Here, she’s doing process improvement, working with the tanks underneath the hot cells in the lab’s Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC), where isotopes are separated and processed, to improve efficiency. It’s her first internship that’s not specifically in industrial engineering, which has allowed her to become more self-reliant.

Also at the REDC is Allison Syron, a second-year industrial engineering major minoring in nuclear power engineering at the University of Tennessee. Syron is working on hot cell campaign reconciliation, confirming that all special nuclear material processed in the hot cells is accounted for by tracking it through each step, evaluating measurements and calculating the inventory difference. If there’s a discrepancy, it’s investigated and resolved to rule out loss, theft, or diversion.

That’s a good fit for Syron, whose internship is with the National Nuclear Security Administration Material Control and Accountability Academy. She wanted to learn how nuclear research can be applied to national security.

“This internship has exposed me to specialized areas of national security that aren’t widely known,” Syron said. “It’s helped me find niche fields I’d be genuinely interested in pursuing.”

She’s also benefited from seeing day-to-day life at the lab.

“Everyone seems super-excited to be here,” Syron said. “Most of our tours ran long because people are super-passionate about their work, talking so much about what they’re interested in because they’ve devoted their lives to these topics. It’s been really refreshing to see that if I do end up here, I will most likely be very happy with my work.”

Syron and fellow NNSA MC&A Academy intern Tim Kirk spent three weeks earlier in the summer at a safeguards and security workshop at Lawerence Livermore National Laboratory in California before returning to ORNL for their research projects. Kirk is working on a process for detecting radiation from sealed waste containers, for both nonproliferation and prevention of leaks and spills. 

Kirk is a rising senior at Florida State University, where he’s a chemical engineering major. Although he’s interested in a nuclear engineering career, FSU doesn’t currently offer that degree.

“I’ve done a bunch of research in physics labs, because that’s the closest I can get,” he said. 

It turns out his FSU research, which included gamma spectroscopy for nuclear physics, gave Kirk the knowledge he needed for his ORNL project.

“I like this because you’re doing applications with nuclear physics rather than just thinking about it,” he said. “It feels like what I learned is translating very well to what the lab does every day with isotopes.”

Kirk has experienced “drinking from the firehose” in terms of the information he’s gaining, but, like the other interns, he appreciates that researchers love to explain what they’re working on. 

“I feel like there’s often this stigma around science and scientists, like they’re all a bunch of super-smart, stuffy people,” Miller said. “That’s not the case at all here. Everyone is so willing to pass on knowledge and teach you everything they possibly can. It’s been such a great experience trying to soak it all in.”

A repeat mentor, Queern said that national lab culture is what she hopes to contribute to.

“I was a first-generation college student, so I wouldn’t have known how to navigate college and get into the workforce without having the good mentors I had,” Queern said. “Since I had that, I feel like I need to provide that to others.”

Miller said her ORNL internship has cemented her interest in a national lab career path.

“Every day, I wake up excited to come here and do the work that we get to do,” she said. “Every day is a new adventure, with a lot more to learn.”

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE’s Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit energy.gov/science.