Further Together the ORAU Podcast

The National Library of Medicine, located on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., is the world's largest biomedical library and an important resources accessed by millions of people around the world. If you're familiar with PubMed, you know the NLM. The NLM is also one of ORAU's longest-standing customers. For more than 30 years, ORAU has helped promote and raise aware...

Dr. LaToya Myles is the deputy director of the Air Resources Laboratory at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division. ORAU works in partnership with NOAA ATDD to perform advanced weather and climate research. Research at ARL focuses on the boundary layer, which is the very air we breathe every day. The ARL includes the Climate Reference Netwo...

Alejandro Borlaff recently completed his NASA Postdoctoral Program experience at NASA Ames, and will continue working for NASA on a number of collaborative projects. He has a long-term interest in space telescopes and Borlaff has gotten to do some amazing work in this area. He calls himself an "ophthalmologist for space telescopes." In this episode, Borlaff and host Michael Holtz talk about his wo...

Erica Barlow, Ph. D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow based at Penn State University working at the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures team. Originally from Australia, Barlow focuses on the question of whether rocks from the ancient Earth have or had life inside them and how life might have gotten there. In this conversation with host Michael Holtz, Barlow discusses her origin story, incl...

ORAU hires and manages contractors on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the National Student Services Contract. Contractors work in the EPA's Office of Research and Development for up to five years and then often become full-time regular employees of the agency. Further Together host Michael Holtz talks to Karen Cleveland and Geri Philpott, who manage the EPA NSSC for ORAU....

Ken Tobin, ORAU chief research and university partnerships officer, introduces host Michael Holtz to Dr. Laurene Tetard, associate professor in the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida. Together they talk about the importance of university partnerships to ORAU and how we work together to provide solutions to our federal government partners. Dr. Tetard digs into her re...

ORAU is among the sponsors of a Research Community Forum presented by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Human Protection. The two-day event will be held March 29 and 30, 2023, in Knoxville. In this episode, Ken Tobin, ORAU chief research and university partnerships officer, and Cathy Fore, senior director of university partnerships, talk about the RCF, why this event is i...

ORAU's Annual Meeting of the Council of Sponsoring Institutions is held to explore relevant topics in higher education. This year's topic is “Climate Security and Environmental Justice: Pathways to Achieving the 2050 Carbon Net-Zero Goal.” Experts and leaders from academia, federal agencies, and national organizations will share their views on technology innovation and transformation; science-base...

Samson Johnson, Ph. D., is a new NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who has been in his role for just a few months, is studying exoplanet demographics or how many and where exoplanets are. An exoplanet is an extrasolar planet and there are approximately 5,000 known in the universe. During this conversation, host Michael Holtz and Dr. Johnson discuss his work, how his interest in astronomy was stoked...

Tiffany Lewis, Ph. D., is a NASA Post-Doctoral Program Fellow working at the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory on theoretical modeling of jets ion active galaxies, especially blazars. She has been a NASA NPP Fellow for two years. In this episode of Further Together: the ORAU Podcast, host Michael Holtz talks to Lewis about her work, being mentored and mentoring others, and what she has planned for...

As a company, ORAU supports financially a number of non-profit organizations in the communities where we do business. As CEO Andy Page says, it's the role of a good corporate citizen. Additionally, many of our employees give of their time, talent and treasure to support organizations that are important to them. For this year's Thanksgiving episode, host Michael Holtz asked several colleagues to sh...

For Stacey Whaley, winning ORAU's Extreme Classroom Makeover 2022 was one of the biggest surprises of her life. She knew she could put the $25,000 prize to good use in her classroom, and boy did she ever. During this conversation, Whaley talks to host Michael Holtz about the new technology she purchased for her classroom, from digital microscopes and iPads to virtual reality headsets and a floor p...

A cornhole competition between ORAU employees and executives, which executives lost, was the high point of the Diversity Council's 30th birthday celebration, which took place on ORAU's Main Campus and virtually in October 2022. The gathering was the first major in-person event since the beginning the pandemic, and celebrated ORAU's commitment to diversity. In this special "man on the street" style...

Alexander Betaller, assistant professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University, was a 2020 recipient of an ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award. With his award, which was matched by his institution, Betaller built a custom optical furnace as part of his team's research into molten salt reactors. The blueprints for the furnace were from the 70s, and molten salt rea...

It's annual giving time at ORAU, and for the third year in a row Michael Holtz sat down with Naomi Asher, executive director of the United Way of Anderson County (and surrounding, let's be real), to talk about how UWAC and its partner agencies meet some of the basic needs of individuals living right here in our communities. Joining this year's conversation are Janet Wood, vice president of communi...

Susan Ehrlich, a former assistant U.S. Attorney and a former judge in Arizona, recently wrote a memorandum for the Central Department of Energy Institutional Review Board discussing explicit and implicit biases in human subjects research. Bias is a critically important issue in research, ensuring that biases are addressed and don't exclude participation in human subjects research. In this conversa...

ORAU has a thriving and growing research enterprise. Returning guest Ken Tobin, ORAU's Chief Research Officer, joins host Michael Holtz for a conversation about some new developments in the research arena, including the creation of a research scientist job family. Ultimately, research is good for the company from a performance and employee engagement perspective. The conversation is brief but very...

Dr. Hilary Marston, an internal medicine physician by training, has long had an interest in public health and global health policy. In 2013, she began work at the National Institutes of Health as an ORISE research program participant as at the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where she was mentored by Dr. Anthony Fauci and worked on several outbreaks including Ebola, Zika an...

We wrap our celebration of National Postdoc Week with an enlightening and inspiring interview with Christina Wildfire, a two-time ORISE research program participant at the National Energy Technology Laboratory. Wildfire's research has focused on using microwave energy to revitalize the coal industry. Currently, as an employee at NETL, she works with scientists and industry to reduce carbon emissio...

As part of our annual observance of National Postdoc Week, this episode of the ORISE Featurecast focuses on Julie Spencer, Ph. D., an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program researcher, who uses mathematics to track and, in collaboration with other scientists, research how to end human suffering from communicable diseases. In this episode, Julie talks to host Michael Holtz...

We all deliver and consume information through the lens of our own biases. Individuals can get the same information and have the same resources, but come to wildly different conclusions. Nick Byrd, a researcher in the ORISE Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, uses his background studying philosophy and applied engineering to help people understand their cognitive biases and en...

ORAU's work with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Atmospheric Turbulence and Diffusion Division (NOAA ATDD) is one of the hidden gems of our company. It's not work we talk about often, but it is exciting and compelling Our team's work focuses on climate research, atmospheric chemistry and dispersion, and boundary layer characterization. The Climate Reference Network, in partic...

For Jonathan Levine, reading the 2002 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report made it clear that global warming and its effects on those of lower-income households were clearly and swiftly becoming a reality. After the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Levine became a participant of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) Postgraduate Research Program, studying deep sea gas and oil...

Scientists and weather watchers have been tracking weather and animal migration data for decades, mostly because they thought the data was interesting. Today, Jeff Kelly, University of Oklahoma biology professor and ORAU consultant, and other scientists use the convergence of archived weather and animal migration data with current technology to track changes caused by climate change over time. "No...

The Free Medical Clinic of Oak Ridge provides no-cost primary care services to 14,000 people in its three-county service area. These are our neighbors, people who don't qualify for TennCare because they make a little too much money but can't afford health insurance. Think the coffee shop baristas, grocery store clerks, food delivery drivers, etc. Ashley Golden, director of health studies, is a mem...