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The seven entrepreneurs for Cohort 2024

Seven entrepreneurs comprise the next cohort of Innovation Crossroads, a DOE Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program node based at ORNL. The program provides energy-related startup founders from across the nation with access to ORNL’s unique scientific resources and capabilities, as well as connect them with experts, mentors and networks to accelerate their efforts to take their world-changing ideas to the marketplace.

Angelique Adams, front left, introduces Kusum Rathore, front center, executive director and vice president of the multi-campus office at the University of Tennessee Research Foundation, and Jim Biggs, executive director of the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center, during the final presentation event for ORNL’s Safari coaching program.

Five researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently completed an eight-week pilot commercialization coaching program as part of Safari, a program funded by DOE’s Office of Technology Transitions, or OTT, Practices to Accelerate the Commercialization of Technologies, or PACT. 

Image with a grey and black backdrop - in front is a diamond with two circles coming out from it, showing the insides.

The world’s fastest supercomputer helped researchers simulate synthesizing a material harder and tougher than a diamond — or any other substance on Earth. The study used Frontier to predict the likeliest strategy to synthesize such a material, thought to exist so far only within the interiors of giant exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.

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The National Security Sciences Directorate within the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has signed a memoranda of understanding with Jackson State University and with Tennessee Tech University. The MOUs detail ORNL’s intention to work with each university to enhance research and educational opportunities in nuclear science and engineering.

Dmytro Bykov, left, and Hector Corzo participate in a value proposition development exercise as part Energy I-Corps

Two ORNL teams recently completed Cohort 18 of Energy I-Corps, an immersive two-month training program where the scientists define their technology’s value propositions, conduct stakeholder discovery interviews and develop viable market pathways.

Man is leaning against the window, arms crossed in a dark navy button up.

Brian Sanders is focused on impactful, multidisciplinary science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, developing solutions for everything from improved imaging of plant-microbe interactions that influence ecosystem health to advancing new treatments for cancer and viral infections. 

Man in blue button down shirt poses outside for a picture with his arms crossed.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has named Troy A. Carter director of the Fusion Energy Division in ORNL’s Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate, or FFESD. 

Ariel view of Oak Ridge National Lab with mountains in the background and buildings and a pond in the foreground

Advanced materials research to enable energy-efficient, cost-competitive and environmentally friendly technologies for the United States and Japan is the goal of a memorandum of understanding, or MOU, between the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Japan’s National Institute of Materials Science.

A macaroni shaped material in colorful rings, purple, red, blue, red, orange and then black.

A new study conducted on the Frontier supercomputer gave researchers new clues to improving fusion confinement. This research, in collaboration with General Atomics and UC San Diego, uncovered that the interaction between ions and electrons near the tokamak's edge can unexpectedly increase turbulence, challenging previous assumptions about how to optimize plasma confinement for efficient nuclear fusion.

Woman is standing at podium holding a gavel in the air.

In May, the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge and Brookhaven national laboratories co-hosted the 15th annual International Particle Accelerator Conference, or IPAC, at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee.