Four scientists affiliated with ORNL were named Battelle Distinguished Inventors during the lab’s annual Innovation Awards on Dec. 1 in recognition of being granted 14 or more United States patents.
In fiscal year 2023 — Oct. 1–Sept. 30, 2023 — Oak Ridge National Laboratory was awarded more than $8 million in technology maturation funding through the Department of Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund, or TCF.
Carl Dukes’ career as an adept communicator got off to a slow start: He was about 5 years old when he spoke for the first time. “I’ve been making up for lost time ever since,” joked Dukes, a technical professional at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Researchers at ORNL are developing advanced automation techniques for desalination and water treatment plants, enabling them to save energy while providing affordable drinking water to small, parched communities without high-quality water supplies.
Inspired by one of the mysteries of human perception, an ORNL researcher invented a new way to hide sensitive electric grid information from cyberattack: within a constantly changing color palette.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is collaborating with industry on six new projects focused on advancing commercial nuclear energy technologies that offer potential improvements to current nuclear reactors and move new reactor designs closer to deployment.
Scientists studying a valuable, but vulnerable, species of poplar have identified the genetic mechanism responsible for the species’ inability to resist a pervasive and deadly disease. Their finding, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to more successful hybrid poplar varieties for increased biofuels and forestry production and protect native trees against infection.
As leader of the RF, Communications, and Cyber-Physical Security Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Kerekes heads an accelerated lab-directed research program to build virtual models of critical infrastructure systems like the power grid that can be used to develop ways to detect and repel cyber-intrusion and to make the network resilient when disruption occurs.