UTRGV and ORNL: Boosting Research While Building a STEM Talent Pipeline

• 11/13/23

The program's impact is to benefit our students with real-world experiences that contribute to the nation's STEM pipeline and to student career paths.

Grush: Which STEM areas will be represented in this program, at least initially, and how will they be integrated into the curriculum?

Saygin: You can look at the DOE and at ORNL for some examples of their areas of development. The R&D work that they do extends across a wide variety of areas. Artificial intelligence for national security, bio-energy, climate change, battery manufacturing, energy storage — the list goes on. These are high-tech, applied R&D areas that will easily connect to industry and the current job market. So, there are many pathways that you can envision through this MOU and many possibilities for students' future employment readiness.

Grush: In what areas will the hands-on research opportunities for undergraduate students be, and what are some of the experiences students will have that they might not encounter in other academic programs?

Saygin: For the MOU, we want to leverage our current investment at the faculty level and at the ongoing research level. So, our current focus in the technology layer includes materials science and engineering, computer and computational science, biological and environmental sciences, nuclear science and engineering, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. And in another layer we can add national security research, which includes data and all sorts of computing and information science-related pieces.

One particular reason we started with materials science, engineering, and computer-related topics, is that we just began our Ph.D. program in materials science and engineering this fall. And in the fall of 2024 we will begin our doctoral program in computer science and engineering.

We want to offer a complete experience that encompasses all currently existing levels — undergraduate students, masters students, doctoral students, and faculty, together with ORNL research scientists. So, the real-life experience that we provide will target all possible layers of interaction within the existing core areas at UTRGV and ORNL.

Our plan is to bring undergraduate students to ORNL during the summer, where they can live, work in the labs with faculty and research scientists, and have access to many extraordinary ORNL resources. For the students, working on multidisciplinary projects in ORNL's state-of-the-art facilities has great relevance for their education goals.

For the students, working on multidisciplinary projects in ORNL's state-of-the-art facilities has great relevance for their education goals.

Grush: In light of the MOU, how will your curriculum address the greater research practices reflected in the DOE Office of Science's mission "to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time"? How could this affect the students' views of their own potential?

Saygin: At the undergraduate level, when you have hundreds of students going through hands-on lab applications, it is very difficult to customize those lab applications and simulate real-world research questions. One of the important goals that we have is to rethink how we define and generate student projects. We'll be opening this up to ideas from ORNL. When it comes to the analytical thinking that we want the undergraduates to develop, it's going to come through those hands-on projects, so that's where we'll focus our energy.

When we have a senior design project, for example, instead of making things up in our own back yard, we'll be taking some input from the research scientists at ORNL. Asking the right questions is at the core of this, and that's where students begin to realize their own ability to ask relevant questions.

And when we get to the masters and doctoral levels, we'll definitely have one-to-one matching topics that get much closer to real-world problems and contribute to the Oak Ridge portfolio as well as to research topics we have on campus. This is where we'll be able to ask faculty to work in depth with the graduate students and involve the ORNL research scientists as well.

Grush: An MOU is not a contract and only serves to formalize and document the intent of the parties. What will ensure the consistency of intentions and make this MOU successful?

Saygin: MOUs are very common; we are not unique in that way, and MOUs don't come with guarantees. But I believe this MOU will be successful. The "secret sauce" in the success of an MOU like this one is in picking the right people. In an MOU, if the partnering company or lab does not have people who are willing to work with you and put the capacity towards making it a success, the agreement becomes a one-way street and will not work.

The "secret sauce" in the success of an MOU like this one is in picking the right people.

Oak Ridge is an R&D institution that is very academic in nature, and that is exactly why the MOU is going to be successful. We've built the MOU on existing collegial relationships. And as part of the mentorship piece, we are planning to have some of the ORNL research scientists involved as adjunct faculty who can serve on dissertation and thesis committees. And that work becomes part of their own professional resumes — a "win-win" all around, among many winning strategies built into the MOU.