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.
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.
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.
Spanning no less than three disciplines, Marie Kurz’s title — hydrogeochemist — already gives you a sense of the collaborative, interdisciplinary nature of her research at ORNL.
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.
For ORNL environmental scientist and lover of the outdoors John Field, work in ecosystem modeling is a profession with tangible impacts.
Moving to landlocked Tennessee isn’t an obvious choice for most scientists with new doctorate degrees in coastal oceanography.
As a metabolic engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Adam Guss modifies microbes to perform the diverse processes needed to make sustainable biofuels and bioproducts.
Carly Hansen, a water resources engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is rethinking what’s possible for hydropower in the United States.