Feature Articles

The key to developing an electric vehicle battery that can charge as quickly as it takes to fill a car with gasoline lies within its materials.

Rigoberto Advincula, a renowned scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee, has won the Netzsch North American Thermal Analysis Society (NATAS) Fellows Award for 2023.

In this Q&A, Berkeley Lab's Yuxin Wu discusses how scientists are developing sensing technologies that could be installed on floating offshore structures. This would allow the structures to self-monitor damaging conditions that could lead to costly repairs, and could also gauge impacts to marine mammals.

Nature-based solutions are an effective tool to combat climate change triggered by rising carbon emissions, whether it’s by clearing the skies with bio-based aviation fuels or boosting natural carbon sinks. At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists are leading research to transform plants into key drivers of decarbonization, from creating biomass crops for new fuels to enhancing the ability of plants to absorb and store carbon.

When the pandemic forced us to keep our distance, people quickly found new ways to come together. By improving existing technologies and developing entirely new ones, we learned how to work, socialize, and share ideas without having to leave the solitary comfort of our living spaces. While this gave us the ability to take back parts of the activities we missed, it also allowed us to connect in new and interesting ways. For scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, this meant being able to make cutting edge scientific instruments available to researchers around the globe.

Partnerships are essential to promote recruitment and retention of diverse talent and creating a diverse workforce benefits everyone. Varied perspectives and experiences often lead to better outcomes and invigorate the work and culture of an organization. For this reason, Brookhaven has been a long-time supporter and partner of the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science (GEM), each year providing summer employment to several GEM fellows.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory joins four other national laboratories — Idaho, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley — that have institutes named after nuclear chemist and Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg.