Feature Articles

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.

From televisions to X-ray machines, many modern technologies are enabled by electrons that have been juiced up by a particle accelerator. Now, Jefferson Lab has teamed up with General Atomics and other partners to unlock even more applications. The team has designed, built and successfully tested a prototype of a key component of particle accelerators that could enable novel industrial applications of accelerators.

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.

Eighth-grade girls from the Chicago area attend the laboratory’s Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day, designed to inspire young women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math.

In January, Sandia National Laboratories and The University of New Mexico created the Quantum New Mexico Institute, a cooperatively run research center headquartered at the university.

As nuclear energy is increasingly recognized as a vital component of the clean energy transition, American companies have answered the call with dozens of new reactor and fuel designs.

Robert Petterborg saw an opportunity to improve a critical part used to test a weapons system. Using his spare time at work and with the help of his Sandia National Laboratories colleagues, he designed a new cable connector that eliminates misalignments that could interfere with testing and potentially damage hardware.

ChatGrid is a practical application of the Department of Energy’s exascale computing efforts and offers a new experience in easy, intuitive, and interactive data interaction

After two decades, laboratory reopens for spent fuel testing