Raina Setzer knows the work she does matters. That’s because she’s already seen it from the other side. Setzer, a radiochemical processing technician in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division, joined the lab in June 2023.
Bob Bolton may have moved to a southerly latitude at ORNL, but he is still stewarding scientific exploration in the Arctic, along with a project that helps amplify the voices of Alaskans who reside in a landscape on the front lines of climate change.
Madhavi Martin brings a physicist’s tools and perspective to biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supporting advances in bioenergy, soil carbon storage and environmental monitoring, and even helping solve a murder mystery.
It was reading about current nuclear discoveries in textbooks that first made Ken Engle want to work at a national lab. It was seeing the real-world impact of the isotopes produced at ORNL
Growing up in suburban Upper East Tennessee, Layla Marshall didn’t see a lot of STEM opportunities for children.
“I like encouraging young people to get involved in the kinds of things I’ve been doing in my career,” said Marshall. “I like seeing the students achieve their goals. It’s fun to watch them get excited about learning new things and teaching the robot to do things that they didn’t know it could do until they tried it.”
Marshall herself has a passion for learning new things.
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.
When virtually unlimited energy from fusion becomes a reality on Earth, Phil Snyder and his team will have had a hand in making it happen.
Chemist Jeff Foster is looking for ways to control sequencing in polymers that could result in designer molecules to benefit a variety of industries, including medicine and energy.
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.
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.