News

On Feb. 18, the world will be watching as NASA’s Perseverance rover makes its final descent into Jezero Crater on the surface of Mars. Mars 2020 is the first NASA mission that uses plutonium-238 produced at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Growing up in the heart of the American automobile industry near Detroit, Oak Ridge National Laboratory materials scientist Mike Kirka was no stranger to manufacturing.

Since the 1930s, scientists have been using particle accelerators to gain insights into the structure of matter and the laws of physics that govern our world.

Marcel Demarteau is director of the Physics Division at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For topics from nuclear structure to astrophysics, he shapes ORNL’s physics research agenda.

Planning for a digitized, sustainable smart power grid is a challenge to which Suman Debnath is using not only his own applied mathematics expertise, but also the wider communal knowledge made possible by his revival of a local chapter of the IEEE professional society.

A collaboration between the ORNL and a Florida-based medical device manufacturer has led to the addition of 500 jobs in the Miami area to support the mass production of N95 respirator masks.

Soteria Battery Innovation Group has exclusively licensed and optioned a technology developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory designed to eliminate thermal runaway in lithium ion batteries due to mechanical damage.

For over half a century, Robert Compton has been a celebrated experimentalist and inspirational leader and teacher in the fields of physics and chemistry. Compton came to work at ORNL's Health Sciences Research Division in 1965 after receiving his doctorate in physics from the University of Tennessee.

Rufus Ritchie came from Kentucky coal country, a region not known for producing physicists.

Herb Mook was a driving force in ORNL neutron s​cience ​for four decades, a prolific and pioneering experimentalist, and a leader and mentor for generations of neutron scattering scientists.