Jesse Labbé: Innovating biotechnology for energy, security and health
Research teams at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory received computing resource awards to train and test AI foundation models for science. A total of six ORNL projects were awarded allocations from the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource, or NAIRR, pilot and the Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program to train their AI models.
Mariam Kiran, a quantum research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was recently honored as a finalist at the British Council’s Study U.K. Alumni Awards 2025, which celebrate the achievements of U.K. alumni worldwide.
Vilmos Kertesz, senior staff in the Biosciences Division at ORNL, has received a 2025 Al Yergey Mass Spectrometry Scientist Award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. The award recognizes his contributions to the fields of analytical chemistry and mass spectrometry.
ORNL has developed a network of autonomous science laboratories outfitted with state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and robotic systems and connected to the lab’s world-class user facilities. The goal is to supercharge the research process while producing scientific breakthroughs that would be unachievable in a traditional setting.
ORNL, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development were recognized by the Federal Laboratory Consortium, or FLC, for their efforts to develop Tennessee as a national leader in fusion energy.
Gerald Tuskan, director of the Center for Bioenergy Innovation and a Corporate Fellow at ORNL, has been awarded the Marcus Wallenberg Prize, the world’s highest honor in the field of forestry, for his pioneering work in sequencing and analyzing the first tree genome.
Daniel Jacobson, distinguished research scientist in the Biosciences Division at ORNL, has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, or AIMBE, for his achievements in computational biology.
Five scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory — Ho Nyung Lee, David Graham, Andrew Sutton, Roger Rousseau and Troy Carter — have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS.
ORNL’s Miaofang Chi and Rigoberto 'Gobet' Advincula have been elected as Class of 2025 Fellows of the Materials Research Society. Chi was recognized for advancing novel electron microscopy methods for studying energy materials, while Advincula was honored for his contributions to research on advanced polymers and nanostructured materials.
Scientists at ORNL have developed a method that can track chemical changes in molten salt in real time — helping to pave the way for the deployment of molten salt reactors for energy production.