Power Player

Plastic is everywhere―from food and drink containers to kids’ toys to car parts.  “We produce billions of tons of plastic waste every year, and many of these materials end up in landfills and they eventually infiltrate the environment,” said Brantley, an assistant professor of chemistry. His StART project focuses on developing new techniques for breaking…

Designing New Materials for Energy, Sustainability, Additive Manufacturing UT Knoxville Chemistry Professor Mike Kilbey received one of UT-ORII’s first seed grants, right after the institute launched. That funding, renewed for 2022, was used to bring together a team of UT faculty, Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers and PhD students specializing in polymer synthesis, computation and…

Erica Grant is the inventor and founder of Quantal Security LLC. Grant’s company uses quantum physics to create better security for door locks and equipment access in facilities that store proprietary information, or which may be at risk for terrorist attacks. Now in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory‘s Innovation Crossroads program, Grant completed her PhD…

Vanshika Singh, a Ph.D. student in Energy Science and Engineering at the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute’s Bredesen Center at UT Knoxville, hopes to work in a national laboratory or in an industry where she can design lower-emission energy systems for high-temperature applications. “My research revolves around developing novel structural designs for energy systems, like coal-biomass…