"Each UT-ORII research initiative represents a huge investment. We're talking about putting 20-plus million dollars of investment into an area and growing it to 20 or more research staff and more than 25 Ph.D. students. It’s a very significant effort. And so it's important to make good choices."
— UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute Director David Sholl
The future of the UT-ORNL partnership lies with the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute, or UT-ORII, which named David Sholl as its second director in April and launched two new “convergent research initiatives” this year that exemplify the institute’s purpose and promise.
Created in 2021 to consolidate existing lab-university collaborations and launch major new research, the institute streamlines and amplifies research and education collaborations that have grown organically over the 80-year relationship between UT and ORNL. Its efforts are important not only to the two institutions, but also to the state of Tennessee as a whole.
“UT-ORII represents a culmination of the partnership,” said Susan Hubbard, ORNL’s deputy for science and technology. “UT-ORII was created to serve as an umbrella for the many existing programs, as well as to align great capabilities and expertise across the UT System and ORNL toward accelerating innovation on key challenging topics that are of strategic interest to both organizations.”
Focused research
The institute’s convergent research initiatives bring together faculty and students through cluster hires that can address critical national challenges requiring multidisciplinary expertise.
The new initiatives announced earlier this year focus on circular bioeconomy systems and radiopharmaceutical therapies. Chosen from among 54 proposals, they join earlier initiatives looking at energy storage and transportation and at clean manufacturing and advanced materials.
The institute will launch a competitive search process for a fifth convergent research initiative later in 2024.
The circular bioeconomy systems initiative will look at the use of plant-based products in manufacturing.
“I would contrast them with our current economy,” Sholl said. “Products — let’s say polymers used in manufacturing vehicles — ultimately come from fossil fuel resources. Those carbon atoms go through various chemical transformations and end up as a plastic that’s used in a car.
“In the bioeconomy we want to get the same resources by growing plants, either by growing some designated plant or using some waste resource. That’s the ultimate difference: We want to use agricultural and forestry resources as the ultimate sources of our chemicals and materials.”
The initiative includes researchers from UT’s Knoxville campus, the UT Institute of Agriculture and ORNL.
Sholl noted that the initiative also emphasizes the recycling of materials, either in their original forms or in different forms for other purposes.
“Usually we want to recycle that polymer to the same polymer,” he said. “But there's many other, more intricate ways you can imagine to do this, where something is used first for one purpose, perhaps second for a different purpose, and so on. The ’systems’ word in the title is very important here, because you can only contemplate those issues if you have a very integrated interdisciplinary group of people thinking about it.”
The radiopharmaceutical therapies initiative will focus on a new generation of theranostics that combine drugs for therapy and for diagnostic imaging. The research will focus on isotopes that emit radioactive alpha particles, which contain two protons and two neutrons and are identical to helium-4 nuclei.
This initiative includes researchers from ORNL; UT, Knoxville; and the UT Health Science Center, located in Memphis. It will also take advantage of the High Flux Isotope Reactor located at ORNL, which already produces medical isotopes such as actinium-227, produced for the prostate cancer drug Xofigo.
The promise of alpha-emitting isotopes for cancer treatment rests in the fact that they deliver a strong dose of radiation but only within a very short space, thus maximizing their ability to kill cancer cells while minimizing damage to nearby healthy tissue.
“ORNL is an absolutely world-class source of isotopes and expertise around isotopes,” Sholl noted. “And there's a huge amount of interest in the medical community about this targeted delivery of radioisotopes.
“The mode of action is that these things work on very short length scales, so if you can selectively deliver it to a tumor, then it will do what you want to that tumor without causing damage elsewhere in the body.”
The challenge, he said, is combining the isotopes with chemicals that will find their way to a specific type of tumor and leave other parts of the body alone.
“There's a huge amount of chemistry and medical science that has to happen to make all those things work together,” Sholl said. “Expanding this to other treatable forms of cancer is challenging because you have to figure out ways to really connect that isotope atom to that selective chemical that will target the tumor. And so a lot of the fundamental work at ORNL is really about understanding the chemistry that's possible with those isotopes.”
A coordinated, statewide effort
The institute is backed by the state of Tennessee, DOE, ORNL and UT. DOE provided an initial $20 million for the institute, and in April 2022 the state provided its full support and another $80 million. The lab is also dedicating resources from its Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.
Joint institute faculty supported by ORNL will be hired through ORNL’s scientific directorates. That financial commitment is critically important as UT-ORII considers upcoming research initiatives, Sholl noted.
“Each UT-ORII research initiative represents a huge investment,” he said. “We're talking about putting 20-plus million dollars of investment into an area and growing it to 20 or more research staff and more than 25 Ph.D. students. It’s a very significant effort. And so it's important to make good choices. But I want us to make forward-looking choices as well.”
Boosting students and workers
UT-ORII is also responsible for promoting education at all levels within the state: graduate, undergraduate, K-12 and worker training. These educational programs often predate the institute.
— UT Knoxville Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Economic Development Deborah Crawford
“Basically we were created as an umbrella for all of these joint programs that have existed between the lab and the university,” noted Joan Bienvenue, the institute’s first director, who’s now with the University of Texas System.
The joint programs brought under UT-ORII include the Joint Faculty Program, the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education, which places Ph.D. students at both UT and ORNL, and the Governor’s Chairs program, which brings eminent researchers to East Tennessee for joint appointments.
By exposing students to team science, world-leading facilities and experts, and both a national laboratory and a university system, UT-ORII programs give students the opportunity to work on bigger, more collaborative projects than they might otherwise encounter.
“Students enrolled at UT have the opportunity to work on the lab reservation, to learn how to work with these large, globally prominent instruments that the lab has, and to tap into the expertise of lab scientists,” said Deborah Crawford, vice chancellor for research, innovation and economic development at UT, Knoxville.
“We find that student experiences at a national laboratory are typically eye-opening,” Hubbard said. “They get a chance to broaden their knowledge as well as contribute to big team-based challenges that are of national importance.”
The institute’s educational outreach also includes younger students. In pursuing these relationships, it partners with organizations that already have longstanding relationships with Tennessee schools.
“In K-12, there’s been a decision made — a good decision in my view — to focus on middle schools, because that's a key point in enabling the trajectories of students,” Sholl said. “And we aim to partner with other organizations — for instance UT Extension, which is already working in every county in the state.”
A unique environment for innovation
Hubbard came to ORNL in 2022 from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which has a very close partnership with the University of California, Berkeley. She said ORNL’s ties to UT are similarly long and deep.
“The state of Tennessee and the Department of Energy’s support of the Institute represents a significant opportunity to align and amplify unique state and federal research assets to great effect.
“UT-ORII focuses on developing a new paradigm for convergent research that will bring the relationship to the next level through strategic alignment and investments in research themes, joint faculty and shared students. The institute will fill a real need, creating a resource-rich and dynamic environment that melds select strengths of ORNL and the UT System in a manner that is expected to have great impact to both the state and nation.”
UT-ORII’s new leader looks forward to groundbreaking research
The UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute has a new leader.
David Sholl, who headed ORNL’s Transformational Decarbonization Initiative, took over as the institute’s interim director in June 2023, replacing outgoing Director Joan Bienvenue. He became its permanent executive director on May 1.
“It's a great opportunity to really drive some research initiatives in a concerted way,” Sholl said. “Often, as a researcher, you keep your head down and work on one thing. This is a chance to take advantage of the strengths of both the lab and the university and bring groups of people together, and that's a very attractive thing.”
Sholl came to ORNL in July 2021 from Georgia Tech, where he chaired the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.
Sholl holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the Australian National University, as well as a master’s degree and Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado.
His research has focused on chemical separations, a process key to a variety of industries, from petrochemical processing to water desalination.
“There’s a huge, huge amount of energy that's used at chemical plants to separate chemicals,” he said, “separating hydrogen from other molecules, separating ethylene from ethane, and so on. Because there's so much energy used doing that, there's a lot of need to develop new technologies to do it with lower energy pathways. That's what I've worked on.”
Sholl is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. He has published more than 420 papers and three books and is editor-in-chief of AIChE Journal.
Looking forward, he sees great things for UT-ORII as the institute pursues its first two initiatives — focusing on energy storage and transportation and on clean manufacturing — and looks to additional initiatives in the coming years.
“What I'd like us to do is select really critical research thrusts,” Sholl said, “things that really matter to the national interest and to the world, and put together interdisciplinary teams that attack those in ways that are very difficult to do if just individual people are bringing their talents.
“And also to bring prominence to our local area. There are already things here at the lab that are really known around the world. But I'd like for us to have research initiatives so that when people ask, who are the best people in the world working on this topic, they think of the University of Tennessee and ORNL.”
