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Brian Wirth grew up in Montana near Malmstrom Air Force Base and its silo of Minuteman missiles. Going to high school during the height of the Cold War, Wirth credits a physics teacher with fueling his desire to pursue nuclear engineering as a career. Today, Wirth—the UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair in Computational Nuclear Engineering—is an authority…

Thomas Zawodzinski has always loved learning, whether it was literature, biology, chemistry, or engineering. He describes himself as a “blue collar boy” from Buffalo, N.Y., the oldest of seven siblings, and a first-generation college student who paid his college bills with scholarship money and earnings from delivering newspapers. Always an outstanding student, he loved—and still…

Steven Zinkle grew up on a dairy farm “close to nowhere” in Wisconsin. Although he had little exposure to science during high school, he wanted to pursue a career other than farming. As an undergraduate in college, he discovered a passion for nuclear materials research and development. Looking back, he thinks that working on his…