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Madhavi Martin portrait image

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.

Mike Huettel

Mike Huettel is a cyber technical professional. He also recently completed the 6-month Cyber Warfare Technician course for the United States Army, where he learned technical and tactical proficiency leadership in operations throughout the cyber domain.

Ken Engle portrait

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 

 

Mirko Musa was always fascinated by the power of rivers, specifically how these mighty waterways sculpt landscapes. Now, as a water power researcher, he’s finding ways to harness that power and protect rivers at the same time. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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. 

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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. 

Yue Yuan, Weinberg Distinguished Staff Fellow at ORNL, is researching ways to create new materials to help the environment. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Growing up in China, Yue Yuan stood beneath the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, built to harness the world’s third-longest river. Her father brought her to Three Gorges Dam every year as it was being constructed across the Yangtze River so she could witness its progress.

Jeff Foster, Distinguished Staff Fellow at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is looking for ways to control polymer sequencing for a variety of uses. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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.

Fungal geneticist Joanna Tannous is gaining a better understanding of the genetic processes behind fungal life to both combat plant disease and encourage beneficial processes like soil carbon storage. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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.

Erica Prates is using her skills as a computational systems biologist to link the smallest molecules to their impact on large ecosystems. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Erica Prates has found a way to help speed the pursuit of healthier ecosystems by linking the function of the smallest molecules to their effects on large-scale processes, leveraging a combination of science, math and computing.

Jack Cahill of ORNL’s Biosciences Division is developing new techniques to view and measure the previously unseen to better understand important chemical processes at play in plant-microbe interactions and in human health. In this photo, Cahill is positioning a rhizosphere-on-a-chip platform for imaging by mass spectrometry. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept of Energy

John “Jack” Cahill is out to illuminate previously unseen processes with new technology, advancing our understanding of how chemicals interact to influence complex systems whether it’s in the human body or in the world beneath our feet.