News

As a computer engineer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Gina Accawi has long been the quiet and steady force behind some of the Department of Energy’s most widely used online tools and applications.

For years Brenda Smith found fulfillment working with nuclear batteries, a topic she’s been researching as a chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

In his career focused on energy storage science, Jianlin Li has learned that discovering new ways to process and assemble batteries is just as important as the development of new materials.

Nuclear physicist Caroline Nesaraja of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory evaluates nuclear data vital to applied and basic sciences. 

Growing up in the heart of the American automobile industry near Detroit, Oak Ridge National Laboratory materials scientist Mike Kirka was no stranger to manufacturing.

Marcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For topics from nuclear structure to astrophysics, he shapes ORNL’s physics research agenda.

Porter Bailey started and will end his 33-year career at ORNL in the same building: 7920 of the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center.

Growing up in Florida, Emma Betters was fascinated by rockets and for good reason. Any time she wanted to see a space shuttle launch from NASA’s nearby Kennedy Space Center, all she had to do was sit on her front porch.

For over half a century, Robert Compton has been a celebrated experimentalist and inspirational leader and teacher in the fields of physics and chemistry. Compton came to work at ORNL's Health Sciences Research Division in 1965 after receiving his doctorate in physics from the University of Tennessee.

Rufus Ritchie came from Kentucky coal country, a region not known for producing physicists.