A 25-year career with the U.S. Navy, commanding combat missions overseas, brought Tom Kollie back to where he came from — ready to serve his country in a new way.
In the mid-1980s, Balendra Sutharshan moved to Canada from the island nation of Sri Lanka. That move set Sutharshan on a path that had him heading continent-spanning collaborations and holding leadership posts at multiple Department of Energy
For years Brenda Smith found fulfillment working with nuclear batteries, a topic she’s been researching as a chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Porter Bailey started and will end his 33-year career at ORNL in the same building: 7920 of the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center.
Planning for a digitized, sustainable smart power grid is a challenge to which Suman Debnath is using not only his own applied mathematics expertise, but also the wider communal knowledge made possible by his revival of a local chapter of the IEEE professional society.
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.