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

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

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.

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.

Herb Mook was a driving force in ORNL neutron s​cience ​for four decades, a prolific and pioneering experimentalist, and a leader and mentor for generations of neutron scattering scientists. 

In the search to create materials that can withstand extreme radiation, Yanwen Zhang, a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says that materials scientists must think outside the box.

In the Physics Division of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, James (“Mitch”) Allmond conducts experiments and uses theoretical models to advance our understanding of the structure of atomic nuclei, which are made of various combinations of protons and neutrons (nucleons).

As a teenager, Kat Royston had a lot of questions. Then an advanced-placement class in physics convinced her all the answers were out there.