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Isabelle Snyder standing in front of screen dislaying national map of US power grids

Isabelle Snyder calls faults as she sees them, whether it’s modeling operations for the nation’s power grid or officiating at the US Open Tennis Championships.

Scott Smith holding machined aluminum part

When Scott Smith looks at a machine tool, he thinks not about what the powerful equipment used to shape metal can do – he’s imagining what it could do with the right added parts and strategies. As ORNL’s leader for a newly formed group, Machining and Machine Tool Research, Smith will have the opportunity to do just that.

In ORNL’s Low Activation Materials Development and Analysis Laboratory, Field makes use of a transmission electron microscope to examine a sample made with a focused ion beam. He investigates the defects produced in a FeCrAl alloy bombarded with neutrons in HFIR. Credit: Carlos Jones/Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Kevin Field at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory synthesizes and scrutinizes materials for nuclear power systems that must perform safely and efficiently over decades of irradiation.

Alex Roschli in front of BAAM

Alex Roschli is no stranger to finding himself in unique situations. After all, the early career researcher in ORNL’s Manufacturing Systems Research group bears a last name that only 29 other people share in the United States, and he’s certain he’s the only Roschli (a moniker that hails from Switzerland) with the first name Alex.

Natalie Griffiths kneading in watershed at ORNL

Growing up, Natalie Griffiths dreamed of playing shortstop for the Toronto Blue Jays. With a stint on the Canadian national women’s baseball team under her belt, Griffiths has retired her glove and now fields scientific questions about carbon and nutrient cycling and water quality ...

Clarice Phelps

More than 70 years ago, United States Navy Captain Hyman Rickover learned the ins and outs of nuclear science and reactor technology at the Clinton Training School at what would eventually become the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Rickover applied his knowl...

Default image of ORNL entry sign

If you ask the staff and researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory how they were first referred to the lab, you will get an extremely varied list of responses. Some may have come here as student interns, some grew up in the area and knew the lab by ...

Lauren Garrison

The materials inside a fusion reactor must withstand one of the most extreme environments in science, with temperatures in the thousands of degrees Celsius and a constant bombardment of neutron radiation and deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, from the volatile plasma at th...

Ryan Kerekes is leader of the RF, Communications, and Cyber-Physical Security Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Photos by Genevieve Martin, ORNL.

As leader of the RF, Communications, and Cyber-Physical Security Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Kerekes heads an accelerated lab-directed research program to build virtual models of critical infrastructure systems like the power grid that can be used to develop ways to detect and repel cyber-intrusion and to make the network resilient when disruption occurs.