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Computational climate scientist Salil Mahajan simulates the complex and chaotic aspects of climate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Simulating the global climate in high resolution at multiple scales will help answer questions about future global and regional climates. However, as performance expectations increase for Earth system models, so do computing challenges. Salil Mahajan, a computational climate sci...

2017 GEM Fellows

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) hosted eight graduate students as part of the National GEM Consortium summer fellowship program this year—seven in the Energy and Environmental Sciences Directorate and one in the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate. The par...

Scientists will use ORNL’s computing resources such as the Titan supercomputer to develop deep learning solutions for data analysis. Credit: Jason Richards/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy.

A team of researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been awarded nearly $2 million over three years from the Department of Energy to explore the potential of machine learning in revolutionizing scientific data analysis. The Advances in Machine Learning to Improve Scient...

Particles collide and stream through ALICE’s detectors, such as the time-projection chamber shown here, and leave tracks that reveal their velocities, momenta and energies. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy; photographer Ja

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began running at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in 2009. The LHC spends most of its time studying the puzzles of high-energy physics. But for one month a year, it, like the Relat...

Mindy Clark with a crop of more than 5,000 Populus plants in an ORNL greenhouse.

Mindy Clark’s enthusiasm for plant biology has only grown from her time in the classroom at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) to her years working in greenhouse operations for private industry and more recently at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory....

ORNL Image

Working backwards has moved Josh Michener’s research far forward as he uses evolution and genetics to engineer microbes for better conversion of plants into biofuels and biochemicals. In his work for the BioEnergy Science Center at ORNL, for instance, “we’ve gotten good at engineering microbes th...

Researchers at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory determined that two-dimensional materials grown onto a cone allow control over where defects called grain boundaries appear.

Rice University researchers have learned to manipulate two-dimensional materials to design in defects that enhance the materials’ properties. The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are combi...

L-R, ORNL’s Bruce Warmack, Nance Ericson with an early prototype of the Hot Stick (ORNL photographer Carlos Jones).
With more volts than ever before in electric vehicles (EVs) and on solar-paneled rooftops, first responder and electrical worker safety is a growing concern. Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are addressing the challenge with the develop...
Joshua New

Joshua New has an ambitious goal to increase the nation’s efficient use of energy: he wants to create a model of every building in America. All 130 million of them. For now, Joshua and his colleagues in the Building Envelope and Urban Systems group are creating virtual models of the buildings in ...

ORNL researcher Tara Pandya, who had an early interest in music, develops Monte Carlo and Deterministic radiation transport codes as a computational nuclear engineer.
Tara Pandya’s interest in nuclear engineering began with a literal flash of inspiration. Pandya originally aspired to become a musician or a music teacher, but grew to love math and physics the more she learned about them. When it came time for college, she wanted to find a progr...