Most graduate programs that are thinking a bit forward recognize that their students don't just go into academia. We’re no longer in a situation where we just train people to place in ivory towers. A lot of our students go to private industry, for example. That fact highlights the need for students to understand entrepreneurship.
— Bredesen Center Director and UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute Education Director Brynn Voy
The integration of UT and ORNL may be best exemplified by the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, a 13-year-old Ph.D. program that places students at both the university and the lab.
“The idea is that it sits right in the middle between UT and Oak Ridge,” said UT materials scientist Philip Rack, the center’s former director. “It’s basically a virtual faculty, so there aren't tenure-track positions in this center; it’s an amalgamation of University of Tennessee faculty and ORNL staff members.”
The center is already a mainstay in the collaboration between UT and ORNL, and it’s about to get much bigger. It has about 75 students supported at ORNL and another 25 to 50 located throughout the university, Rack said, but plans call for boosting the total number up to 500 in the coming years.
An interdisciplinary approach
Flexibility has been baked into the Bredesen Center approach since day one, said Lee Riedinger, the center’s first director.
“Part of the idea was that this would be a fully interdisciplinary degree, where students could take courses from any department,” he said. “The problem with a Ph.D. in physics or chemical engineering is you’ve got to stock up mostly on courses in that department, and there isn't time to take courses in other departments, whereas our students could take courses from any department."
“The Bredesen Center was created with interdisciplinary graduate student training in mind,” agreed UT obesity researcher Brynn Voy, who in August 2023 became director of the center and education director of the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute. “It recognizes that the big science problems that national labs in particular were created to address — the ones you read about on the front page of the paper — can't be solved by a single discipline.”
Grad students at the Bredesen Center go into one of three Ph.D. programs: data science and engineering, energy science and engineering, or genome science and technology.
The program in data science takes advantage of ORNL’s computing expertise as well as its world-leading supercomputers. Students in this program choose from among five focus areas: advanced manufacturing, climate science, biology, materials science and national security. For their part, students in energy science and engineering can focus on areas including nuclear energy, bioenergy, renewable energy, grid management and energy materials.
Genome science and technology is the latest program to join the Bredesen Center, although it’s the oldest program of the three, dating back to 1998. Research areas in this program include molecular genetics and systems biology, structural and nanoscale biology, and computational biology and bioinformatics.
Focuses beyond academics
The Bredesen Center is distinguished both by its interdisciplinary nature and by its insistence that students explore focuses outside the academic realm, Rack said. Known as breadth areas, these include entrepreneurship, policy and community outreach.
Voy noted that breadth areas are especially helpful to students who choose careers outside of academia.
“Most graduate programs that are thinking a bit forward recognize that their students don't just go into academia. We’re no longer in a situation where we just train people to place in ivory towers. A lot of our students go to private industry, for example. That fact highlights the need for students to understand entrepreneurship.”
Indeed, Bredesen Center students have a history of starting companies. Between 2012 and 2022, Bredesen Center students registered seven new companies, some while they were still students at the center.
In the years since the center’s creation in 2011, other UT graduate programs also allow students to become entrepreneurs, noted Deborah Crawford, UT Knoxville’s vice chancellor for research, innovation and economic development.
“Students in Ph.D. programs outside the joint Ph.D. programs have the opportunity to focus on entrepreneurship,” she said, “but there isn't such a strong focus on public policy in some of the other programs. So I think it's fair to say that the Bredesen Center led the charge, thinking about how the students that go through Ph.D. programs aren't all going to track into academic positions. In fact, we want to prepare students for a variety of career choices, and the Bredesen Center really was a pioneer at the university.”
Encouraged by a physicist governor
The center was created at the urging of then-Gov. Phil Bredesen.
“This was all Phil Bredesen’s idea, his last big idea as a two-term governor,” said Riedinger, who served as the center’s director until 2019. “Bredesen has a physics undergraduate degree from Harvard, and it was his idea to start some kind of interdisciplinary Ph.D., perhaps in energy, between UT and the lab.”
The Bredesen Center isn’t ORNL’s first venture into graduate education; UT grad students have been working at the lab for decades. In fact, the UT-ORNL Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, based in ORNL’s Biology Division, opened more than 50 years ago in 1967 and operated for 30 years.
In one sense, said Riedinger, the Bredesen Center formalized a relationship between the two institutions that had been going on for decades.
“We’ve had grad students at UT — some of my own and others — working at ORNL for decades. Indeed, I was a graduate student from Vanderbilt working here on my dissertation research. The difference about the Bredesen Center is that now, the people here are officially joint faculty at UT and mentors of the grad students, whereas before that, you'd have a research advisor here, but a faculty member at UT would have to be the real adviser and the real person to sign the dissertation.
“That was a big step forward,” he added, “because researchers at ORNL really enjoyed having their own grad students and signing the dissertation and attending graduation ceremonies and putting the Ph.D. hood on the students.”