Feature Articles

Curiosity and enthusiasm for the beauty in every molecule inspire ORNL’s Canan Karakaya, who uses computational modeling to design, improve and scale up chemical reactors that make high-value chemicals and energy-dense fuels.

For kids in underserved communities, access to STEM experiences does not come as a given. Candice Halbert, YO-STEM founder and chemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is working to change this. Halbert devotes her time outside the lab to building STEM opportunities for youth in nearby communities.

YO-STEM, or Youth Outreach in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, has served the local community for seven years, and this marks year three for its competitive co-ed robotics teams. Currently, YO-STEM robotics teams, Radium and Gr8ness, rank 16 and 17 out of 145 teams in Tennessee registered for the middle-school robotics competition hosted by VEX on March 8 and 9 in Hendersonville, Tenn. The two teams are also the only Knox County teams in the state’s top 20 for this robotics competition. 

Fengqui "Frank" Li is a computational developer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who uses his background in architecture and interest in crosscutting research to pursue a landscape of ideas related to building energy usage and urban systems.

Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, to conduct computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.

Some of the ORNL AGU23 attendees share their thoughts on this year’s meeting and how they’re looking at the future of geophysical sciences in their areas.

Chelsea Chen, a polymer physicist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is studying ion transport in solid electrolytes that could help electric vehicle battery charges last longer. “The challenge with current EVs is to further increase driving range, and that means higher energy density,” said Chen. “This requires revolutionary design of the battery chemistry.”

A modeling analysis led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory gives the first detailed look at how geothermal energy can relieve the electric power system and reduce carbon emissions if widely implemented across the United States within the next few decades.

Researchers at the Statewide California Earthquake Center, or SCEC, are unraveling the mysteries of earthquakes by using physics-based computational models running on high-performance computing systems at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team’s findings will provide a better understanding of seismic hazards in the Golden State. 

Research led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Marti Checa and Liam Collins has pioneered a groundbreaking approach, described in the journal Nature Communications, toward understanding the behavior of an electric charge at the microscopic level.