Paula Cable-Dunlap is a pioneer in the field of nuclear nonproliferation, though many are unaware of her prestige due to her major accomplishments taking place in a classified subject area. Cable-Dunlap has been at Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory since 2010, previously spending 18 years at Savannah River National Laboratory. She was recently named as an ORNL Corporate Fellow, the highest recognition for members of the ORNL research staff.
We sat down with Cable-Dunlap to chat about her prolific career, her approach as a leader and the importance of mentorship.
Q: You were recently named an ORNL Corporate Fellow. Congratulations! What was your reaction to receiving this recognition?
A: I was definitely shocked. Being in national security, we don’t get to publish a lot. For the most part, to be a recognized leader in science, your name has to be out there in open literature. Throughout my career that’s spanned over 30 years now — starting while I was still in graduate school at Savannah River with a clearance — it’s been really difficult to publish in open literature.
I was truly shocked by being the first person to break that ceiling from the national security perspective because the majority of my work is classified. I felt very humbled.
Q: How do you feel being a Corporate Fellow will change your role at ORNL, if at all?
A: Thus far, we have had discussions about things going on with the laboratory and I feel like corporate Fellows have a stronger voice for the scientists with our leadership.
It’s quite an honor to be able to have that influence, if you will, and there’s some very strong people in these fellowships. I truly believe we can be impactful in terms of policies at the lab. That’s very rewarding indeed.
Q: You’re known not only for your achievements, but in your role as a leader. Do you have a philosophy that helps you approach mentoring early career researchers?
A: I think it’s incredibly important for our early career folks — including grad students, postdocs, new hires, staff members — to feel seen and heard. Many are coming out of a college environment which is very different than the national lab environment, and I think most of them go through a bit of culture shock.
I try to meet as many of them as I can and talk with them. I take great pride in mentoring. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and any information and expertise I’ve gleaned over the years I am absolutely all about sharing that with other people, getting folks involved and going cross-directorate.
It’s funny, a lot of people call me “lab mom,” which actually tickles me, truly it does.
I hope to not only mentor them in terms of how the laboratory works and the science and how you get projects funded and that sort of thing. But also, it’s a very tough environment when you come out of college into what we do. It’s a big jump. I think it’s really important to include people.
I also like to get folks together. There’s nothing better than a team to make people feel included and like their work matters. Everything I do is with a team. We have a shared location on the classified side called the mosh pit because there’s a lot of terminals and different networks in there. It’s a place for us to get together and have that camaraderie.
Q: Are there additional challenges that come with building effective teams within a classified subject area?
A: Yes. There are specific programs which require you have to have more than just our standard clearances that you have to tiptoe around. It’s really important for you to understand who does and does not have access and need-to-know status for some of those programs. It’s sort of a discovery mission when you first start working on a project to know who can talk to whom.
There are challenges, but, again, I think getting folks together, bringing that understanding of what projects are, what they aren’t, how we can go about doing things in an open science environment at the laboratory and still get our jobs done from the dark side of the house.
Q: What’s your advice for aspiring leaders?
A: If you have aspirations to go into more of a formal leadership role like a group leader or section head, I highly recommend you get your technical acumen in order first because once you get into a leadership role, there's an expectation of you taking care of your people.
From my perspective, it’s incredibly important for you to be established in a technical field first. You seem to get more respect with the sponsors that we typically work with if you have that expertise behind you.
You also have to be organized, which is my biggest fault. I am not an organized person.
You just sort of learn over the years, but it really does give people a leg up, if you go into those leadership roles, to read as much as you can about best practices for leadership in those sorts of things.
The other thing is, I’ve seen leaders that let it go to their head a bit.That’s the last thing you need. You're no better or worse than anybody else on your team or at the lab, or your colleagues at other labs.There’s just no room for that avarice. I never, ever say people work for me. I said they work with me. It’s not my section, it’s our section. It’s not my project, it’s our project. I think that’s very important from a leadership perspective because if folks think they’re not being seen on particular projects or with sponsors or with their management of the line that doesn’t serve anyone well.
Q: A lot of people have said the work you’re doing is making the world a safer place. What do you think?
A: We support nuclear nonproliferation, and we develop capabilities and technologies to better understand parts of the nuclear fuel cycle. When you start to understand how things operate, you can get a better understanding of what it might look like if a proliferator were to do the things we’re doing.
Some of the technologies and capabilities we’ve developed have enhanced our ability to detect when a declared facility may not be doing what its declaration says it should.
We’ve developed advanced analytical techniques that take us from collecting samples to analyzing them, all the way through the interpretation.
We help turn a garbled mess of results into something that’s very impactful to the broader community. The capabilities we develop, in many instances, are transitioned to stakeholders. That’s one of the biggest achievements you can have in our world: when something you’ve developed actually turns out to be useful to the broader nonproliferation community. That’s the ultimate reward.
Q: You’ve worked at other national organizations, including another national lab. What’s special about ORNL?
I honestly felt like a kid in a candy store when I got to Oak Ridge and became aware of all the real nuclear processes happening here and all the next-level analytical capabilities. You’re standing in front of limitless possibilities.
It was mind blowing to me that some of the papers I would read were written by somebody in the next building, and they were world experts. One of the best things for me was the foundational, fundamental science being done at laboratory. That is absolutely applicable to what we do on the nonproliferation national security side.
We’re able to find those links and make the connections and bring basic science into application. That’s incredibly rewarding. It also sincerely reduces the timeline for developing a new capability for national security.
We also have user facilities like the Spallation Neutron Source and HFIR (High Flux Isotope Reactor). These facilities allow us to do things nobody else in the world can do. When you're looking at atoms rather than a bulk sample and you get that foundational understanding of the materials process, there’s no substitute. It really sets Oak Ridge apart from the other national laboratories.
Q: I’ve heard you sometimes have late nights at the lab. When you go home on time or have time off, what do you do for fun?
A: I have kind of a strange existence. My husband and I have a house in Waynesville, NC, where he has a business. I always tell people I work at ORNL, but I live in Waynesville.
I come home every weekend and spend a couple days with my husband. We have a boat, and we like going camping in Western North Carolina. Both of us were brought up there, so it’s home to us.
Q: Anything else?
A: I’ve been blessed with having great mentors. I’ve had phenomenal managers both at Oak Ridge and Savannah River, so I want to give them a shout out. They’ve given me opportunities and essentially let me chart my path myself, and they were always there to help. That’s a very important part of how I’ve gotten to where I am.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. — Audrey Carson
