2017 ORNL Futbol Game

Mentors versus Interns  it was. The Mentors always win, of course. We can't let those young punks get too cocky. So this time we were 3-2 down at half time and so we cancelled the second half due to rain. Now, in TN when you abandon a game before the second half it becomes invalid, meaning the result from last year (which we of course won) carries over and applies this year as well. So we won. And, anyway, as Budhu stated in the official FIFA match report, the rain 'prevented the greatest Mentor comeback in history'. So there.

Frank Munger

Frank Munger

Yesterday Frank Munger, the local journalist who wrote about Oak Ridge science for the Knoxville News Sentinel and in the associated  "Atomic City Underground" blog, retired.

His blog kept us informed daily about what was going on at Y12, other areas of ORNL and the region. He was also a strong supporter of Club Mod.   He was given the "Muddy Boot Award" yesterday for his contributions to building the local community's economic base.

We're all sad to see you go, Frank! We wish you a fulfilling and rewarding retirement! Maybe you'd consider writing a book about Oak Ridge. Nobody would be better positioned to do so.

Drug Discovery Research at Oak Ridge

Well, I've been involved to some extent in human health research for a while, including participating in research suggesting a common pharmacophoric footprint for AIDS vaccine design and in helping design experimental methods for detecting single tumour marker molecules in serum.

Now we appear to be on the road to working with Milton Brown and his colleagues at Georgetown University in prostate cancer research, as part of a new NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award center. Milton heads the Drug Discovery Center at Georgetown Medical School. The idea here is to use Oak Ridge's supercomputers to help design molecules of potential therapeutic use. Jerome Baudry will play a leading role in this research from our side. I'm kind of excited about what might happen.....

Reasons to be Cheerful, Part III

(i.e. successes of people I am working with..
..see here and here for Parts I and II.)

Jerome B. got an NIH grant with Igor Jouline.
Xiaolin C. has been publishing like crazy.
Tongye S. got a cheery new postdoc.
Ricky S. got a cheery new supervisor.
Hong G. got a cheery new DOE mercury grant (with cheery me:-)).
Hao-Bo G. got a PNAS paper and yanked his green card out of the fire.
Barbara C. is getting her mega-CPU drug design stuff in shape.
Krishnan got a faculty position
Moumita got a well-behaved cellulase reaction profile.
Jerry P. was on TV talking about our mercury stuff.
Loukas P. is, amazingly, self-similar over 3 orders of magnitude.
Nikolai S.'s simulations agree with spin-echo experiments.
Srini got invited for a faculty interview.
Zheng got beamtime for P450 neutron experiments.
Yinglong got intriguing solvent-channel results.
Dennis G.'s paper on water model comparisons was published.
Xiaohu H. got weird and wonderful phase transitions in water (do we believe them?:-).
Benjamin L. 's lignin:cellulose simulation movies wowed the Undersecretary and others.
Roland S. scaled MD to 150,000 cores.
Jason H. decided wisely to join us.
Barmak M. has learned he can work well wherever he is.
Isabella D. got a faculty position.
Zoe C. got a faculty position.
Nadia E. became a Mum (and got her bacteriorhodopsin paper finished as well!)
Thomas N. graduated summa cum laude.
Petra I. seems to be quite desired in Germany these days.
Jakob U. has definitively solved the peptide membrane partioning problem.
Mithun B. has his theory paper on DNA submitted.
Emal A. is getting a mega-salary (f0r a while).
Tomasz B. got good reviews for his paper.
Mai Z. got good reviews for her paper.
Dieter K. got his QM/MM paper submitted.
Thomas S. got his second actin paper submitted.
Lipi T. understands peptide folding like no other.
Corinne W. got her Diplomarbeit nailed.
Heinrich K.'s model for cellulose H-bonds behaves most interestingly.
Karine V. has a cheery mechanism for nucleosome dynamics.

..now who's going to come back at me for forgetting someone this time?....

ORNL Voted Top Place to be a Postdoc

....here in The Scientist magazine, though dropping to 38th place from 11th last year.

Did they take into account that Knoxville is Number One nationally for allergies?

Foreigners at ORNL

A recent blog item of Frank Munger's deals with the travails of non-citizens at ORNL. While it's true ORNL overtly brands us as potentially dangerous with glaring red badges, the practical fallout of this and other measures is minimal, and things are somewhat easier than what I witnessed as an "Agent CEA" in the French National Laboratory at Saclay in the 1990s. No, the main obstacles hampering our attempts to get our work done come not from ORNL but from dealing with visas and green cards for lab members - a constant headache.

All this reminds me of my former mentor, Martin Karplus, who tried to move from Harvard to Paris in 1974. The Universite Paris VII (Jussieu) wanted to offer him a tenured professorship, but tenured professors were civil servants and thus had to be French. Enter Jacques-Emile Dubois , a lively man who I enjoyed chatting with occasionally while working with the French Chemical Society. Dubois was a chemistry professor at Jussieu, but he was also Head of Research at the French Minstry of Defence and he had connections high up in the Pompidou adminstration. Dubois got weaving and, sure enough, eventually a decree was published exempting university professors from the citizenship requirement. However, by that time I think Martin had had enough and he didn't leave Harvard (wisely maybe: even a Dubois couldn't cure the deeper sclerosis of the French academic administration), but he apparently received a number of thank-you letters afterwards.

Wonderful Video Compilation from one of our Graduate Students...

Splette Showreel 2010 from Thomas Splettstoesser on Vimeo.

Having got that out of the way maybe he can now concentrate on graduating??? (grin)

[small disclaimer: about one second of the video depicts cows and small furry animals succumbing to mercury poisoning - not something that happens very often in reality]

ORNL-UT cooperation to be strengthened..

....according to an announcement by Gov. Bredesen, with 200 new faculty positions at UT staffed by researchers at the lab, and a doubling of the number of doctoral degrees awarded at the university. This is just what both institutions need, but for best effect will require overcoming some obstacles.

One of these is that there is a problem at ORNL in housing undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs as they do not 'carry off' much overhead. Thus, according to the 'full cost recovery' model by which ORNL operates, these young researchers become financial liabilities for ORNL, which must provide office space, heating, basic facilities etc out of the organisational burden (overhead), even if they arrive with salaries from elsewhere. This problem could be remedied at least in part by expanding the space allocated on the ORNL campus to the UT/ORNL Joint Institutes, by re-assigning parts of existing buildings, if this is legally conceivable. My perception (maybe wrong?) is that the Joint Institutes have so far been largely technology platforms e.g., for the Bioenergy Science Center (BESC) systems biology apparatus and the UT/ORNL NSF Kraken supercomputer. Although BESC and Kraken have been very successful for both UT and ORNL, (and I am involved with both myself) the dedication of the Joint Institutes to facilities rather than UT:ORNL grassroots research cooperation leaves a vacuum. So basically what I am saying is that if a student, postdoc or visitor wants to come and work with an ORNL staff member or UT faculty member at ORNL (and has their salary already paid from some external source) then ORNL needs to have a mechanism in place to welcome these people with space, offices and open arms, without needing to worry about extra costs, and whatever the subject they work on: this will be cost effective for ORNL in the long run as it will produce lots of cheap, high-profile science that can be used to write money-winning grants in the future.

Secondly, if ORNL staff scientists are to become UT faculty then they need to teach - maybe not a lot, but some at least - and most of the staff scientists I know would be happy to do this. This would help staff UT classrooms in the coming budget crunch, but there would have to be a mechanism in place to pay them. Given the relatively high salaries and astronomical overheads applied at ORNL the hourly rate of an average staff scientist is likely to be much higher than UT could afford. Hence, the corresponding budget strain may have to be absorbed by the funding agencies currently paying the staff scientist salaries. How they could do that is a good question, but I believe it is in the interests of the agencies themselves (DOE, NIH, NSF, etc) that their funded researchers keep their minds broadened and in contact with bright students by the noble endeavour of teaching. It's certainly in the interests of both ORNL and UT to have hordes of bright, motivated graduate students populating the offices and corridors at Oak Ridge at midnight...