Chuck Kessel was still in high school when he saw a scientist hold up a tiny vial of water and say, “This could fuel a house for a whole year.”
Growing up in Florida, Emma Betters was fascinated by rockets and for good reason. Any time she wanted to see a space shuttle launch from NASA’s nearby Kennedy Space Center, all she had to do was sit on her front porch.
As a teenager, Kat Royston had a lot of questions. Then an advanced-placement class in physics convinced her all the answers were out there.
Peter Wang is focused on robotics and automation at the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL, working on high-profile projects such as the MedUSA, a large-scale hybrid additive manufacturing machine.
A typhoon strikes an island in the Pacific Ocean, downing power lines and cell towers. An earthquake hits a remote mountainous region, destroying structures and leaving no communication infrastructure behind.
Ask Tyler Gerczak to find a negative in working at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and his only complaint is the summer weather. It is not as forgiving as the summers in Pulaski, Wisconsin, his hometown.
When Scott Smith looks at a machine tool, he thinks not about what the powerful equipment used to shape metal can do – he’s imagining what it could do with the right added parts and strategies. As ORNL’s leader for a newly formed group, Machining and Machine Tool Research, Smith will have the opportunity to do just that.
Alex Roschli is no stranger to finding himself in unique situations. After all, the early career researcher in ORNL’s Manufacturing Systems Research group bears a last name that only 29 other people share in the United States, and he’s certain he’s the only Roschli (a moniker that hails from Switzerland) with the first name Alex.
If you ask the staff and researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory how they were first referred to the lab, you will get an extremely varied list of responses. Some may have come here as student interns, some grew up in the area and knew the lab by ...