Dr. Thomas Zacharia announced his intent to retire as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory at the end of 2022, the culmination of a 35-year career at the nation’s largest science and energy laboratory.

Zacharia has served as laboratory director since July 2017, overseeing the lab’s extensive $2.5 billion research portfolio and staff of nearly 6,000.

Though Nell Barber wasn’t sure what her future held after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, she now uses her interest in human behavior to design systems that leverage machine learning algorithms to identify faces in a crowd. Her subsequent degree in computer science paved the way for her current research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory – designing software to accurately identify diverse faces from a distance, in a variety of contexts, and with privacy of each person in mind.

Burak Ozpineci, a Corporate Fellow and section head for Vehicle and Mobility Systems Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is one of six international recipients of the eighth Nagamori Award chosen annually by the Nagamori Foundation based in Kyoto, Japan. The honor recognizes outstanding researchers and engineers working in electric motors, motor drives and related fields.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have definitively linked the function of a specific domain of proteins important in plant-microbe biology to a cancer trigger in humans, knowledge that had eluded scientists for decades.

The team’s findings, published in Nature Communications Biology, open up a new avenue for the development of selective drug therapies to fight a variety of cancers such as those that begin in the breast and stomach.