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Omar Demerdash

With the rise of the global pandemic, Omar Demerdash, a Liane B. Russell Distinguished Staff Fellow at ORNL since 2018, has become laser-focused on potential avenues to COVID-19 therapies.

Coronavirus graphic

In the race to identify solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are joining the fight by applying expertise in computational science, advanced manufacturing, data science and neutron science.

Starch granules

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a new method to peer deep into the nanostructure of biomaterials without damaging the sample. This novel technique can confirm structural features in starch, a carbohydrate important in biofuel production.

Ethan Coon uses math and computational science to model the flow of above and belowground water in watersheds.

As a computational hydrologist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Ethan Coon combines his talent for math with his love of coding to solve big science questions about water quality, water availability for energy production, climate change, and the

Amber McBride is using her expertise in nanotechnology, drug delivery, and disease models to research fundamental challenges in human health in the ORNL Biosciences Division. Photographed by Carlos Jones, ORNL.

Amber McBride is using her expertise in nanotechnology, drug delivery, and disease models to research fundamental challenges in human health in the ORNL Biosciences Division. 

Omar Demerdash

Attracted to biology, math, and physics as a young student, Omar Demerdash decided that when the time came to narrow his academic interests he wouldn’t pick and choose: he’d pursue them all. Today he’s using his expertise in computational biophysics to model and analyze how molecules interact with p...

Esther Parish

Esther Parish’s holistic approach to life is apparent not only in her environmental research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but in her careful cultivation of a future crop of young scientists. Her expertise as a geographer coupled with a keen interest in the natural world drives Parish’s resea...

Oak Ridge National Laboratory bioinformatics researcher Dan Jacobson plugs AI, deep learning into biosystems.

Dan Jacobson is illuminating the workings of biological systems from the molecular scale up by leveraging Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s supercomputing resources to create machine- and deep-learning techniques more easily understood by humans

David Weston

David Weston became fascinated with plant genetics and ecology in college, and now with the support provided by the DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program, he will link those fields as he studies plant-microbe symbiosis. The research will focus on sphagnum moss, a dominant plant of n...