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For NASA’s Mars 2020 rover mission, Nidia Gallego produces components of carbon-bonded carbon fiber (CBCF, in gray) for insulating an iridium-clad plutonium heat source power supply (inert prototype shown in silver).

Growing up in Colombia, Nidia Gallego was a diamond in the rough; she had no inkling that she would later shine as a scientist. Her father, a salesman, and mother, a homemaker, had not had the opportunity to complete high school themselves and urged their six children to stay in schoo...

Jason Newby is a physicist in the Nuclear Security and Isotope Technology Division at ORNL.
Not everyone can look back on their life and pick the specific instance that brought them to their current field and dictated the course of their career. For Jason Newby, that instance was a high school physics class that would eventually lead to him studying nuclear technology and i...
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Rich Davies recently joined Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as deputy director of the Sustainable Transportation Program. Having previously worked in vehicle and manufacturing research, program management, and strategic planning at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), he comes to ORNL ...

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Merlin Theodore is used to the role of pathfinder, having been the first among her family of 11 siblings to pursue graduate studies and then take up a career as a technology innovator. That path led to the doorstep of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she was recently hired as director of the US ...

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Ever since she was a young girl in the small town of Toa Alta, Puerto Rico, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researcher Marissa Morales has had a fascination with science. “When I was a child- maybe 10 or 11- I would mix random ingredients. I put some samples in the freezer, other samples in the ref...

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A penchant for playing with the rules of thumb has pushed Burak Ozpineci’s research to the cutting edge of power electronics design for efficient, clean energy—whether that is researching new semiconductors, building new types of power inverters and converters, or creating a way to wirelessly transf...

Yilu Liu with the FNET GridEye system in the lab.
It’s an interesting time to be a power systems engineer: renewable generation is flourishing and bringing with it a unique set of challenges. For a researcher like Yilu Liu with a love of problem-solving and prowess in both engineering and science, the task of modernizing the age...
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Ecologist Virginia Dale is an ORNL corporate fellow and director of the lab’s Center for BioEnergy Sustainability. In her work she focuses on environmental decision making, plant succession, land-use change, landscape ecology, ecological modeling, sustainability, and bioenergy systems. Dale...

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Stan Wullschleger did not intend to stay so long at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but as many other scientists can relate, time flies when you’re engaged in interesting work. “I don’t know if you can tell while it’s happening or you just notice it in hindsight, but the lab is a wonderful place t...

Agricultural engineer Erin Webb is raising two sons with her husband on their 94-acre farm
As an agricultural engineer, Erin Webb would do almost anything in the name of science. Not so long ago, the senior research and development scientist within Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Environmental Sciences Division was hauling cow waste in buckets once a week from a col...