Mirko Musa spent his childhood zigzagging his bike along the Po River. The Po, Italy’s longest river, cuts through a lush valley of grain and vegetable fields, which look like a green and gold ocean spreading out from the river’s banks.
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.
Seven scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have been named Battelle Distinguished Inventors, in recognition of their obtaining 14 or more patents during their careers at the lab.
Matthew Craig grew up eagerly exploring the forest patches and knee-high waterfalls just beyond his backyard in central Illinois’ corn belt. Today, that natural curiosity and the expertise he’s cultivated in biogeochemistry and ecology are focused on how carbon cycles in and out of soils, a process that can have tremendous impact on the Earth’s climate.
Tomás Rush began studying the mysteries of fungi in fifth grade and spent his college intern days tromping through forests, swamps and agricultural lands searching for signs of fungal plant pathogens causing disease on host plants.
Chemical and environmental engineer Samarthya Bhagia is focused on achieving carbon neutrality and a circular economy by designing new plant-based materials for a range of applications from energy storage devices and sensors to environmentally friendly bioplastics.
Science has taken Melanie Mayes from Tennessee to the tropics, studying some of the most important ecosystems in the world.
ORNL, TVA and TNECD were recognized by the Federal Laboratory Consortium for their impactful partnership that resulted in a record $2.3 billion investment by Ultium Cells, a General Motors and LG Energy Solution joint venture, to build a battery cell manufacturing plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee.
Carrie Eckert applies her skills as a synthetic biologist at ORNL to turn microorganisms into tiny factories that produce a variety of valuable fuels, chemicals and materials for the growing bioeconomy.