Madhavi Martin brings a physicist’s tools and perspective to biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supporting advances in bioenergy, soil carbon storage and environmental monitoring, and even helping solve a murder mystery.
In a discovery aimed at accelerating the development of process-advantaged crops for jet biofuels, scientists at ORNL developed a capability to insert multiple genes into plants in a single step.
As renewable sources of energy such as wind and sun power are being increasingly added to the country’s electrical grid, old-fashioned nuclear energy is also being primed for a resurgence.
Matthew Craig grew up eagerly exploring the forest patches and knee-high waterfalls just beyond his backyard in central Illinois’ corn belt. Today, that natural curiosity and the expertise he’s cultivated in biogeochemistry and ecology are focused on how carbon cycles in and out of soils, a process that can have tremendous impact on the Earth’s climate.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist Elizabeth “Libby” Johnson (1921-1996), one of the world’s first nuclear reactor operators, standardized the field of criticality safety with peers from ORNL and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Six scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory were named Battelle Distinguished Inventors, in recognition of obtaining 14 or more patents during their careers at the lab.