When reading the novel Jurassic Park as a teenager, Jerry Parks found the passages about gene sequencing and supercomputers fascinating, but never imagined he might someday pursue such futuristic-sounding science.
Climate change often comes down to how it affects water, whether it’s for drinking, electricity generation, or how flooding affects people and infrastructure. To better understand these impacts, ORNL water resources engineer Sudershan Gangrade is integrating knowledge ranging from large-scale climate projections to local meteorology and hydrology and using high-performance computing to create a holistic view of the future.
Stephen Dahunsi’s desire to see more countries safely deploy nuclear energy is personal. Growing up in Nigeria, he routinely witnessed prolonged electricity blackouts as a result of unreliable energy supplies. It’s a problem he hopes future generations won’t have to experience.
Joanna Tannous has found the perfect organism to study to satisfy her deeply curious nature, her skills in biochemistry and genetics, and a drive to create solutions for a better world. The organism is a poorly understood life form that greatly influences its environment and is unique enough to deserve its own biological kingdom: fungi.
Hydrologist Jesús “Chucho” Gomez-Velez is in the right place at the right time with the right tools and colleagues to explain how the smallest processes within river corridors can have a tremendous impact on large-scale ecosystems.
The truth is neutron scattering is not important, according to Steve Nagler. The knowledge gained from using it is what’s important
Marcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For topics from nuclear structure to astrophysics, he shapes ORNL’s physics research agenda.
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.”
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.
Systems biologist Paul Abraham uses his fascination with proteins, the molecular machines of nature, to explore new ways to engineer more productive ecosystems and hardier bioenergy crops.