Duke Plans Oak Ridge Oversight

Duke is now completing plans for its participation as one of six lead universities helping to oversee the prestigious Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Duke administrators coordinating Duke's participation say that the relationship will likely offer important opportunities for research and education.

Last October, it was announced that the University of Tennessee and Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, had been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to operate ORNL, in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The management team will assume responsibility for the laboratory on April 1.

To enhance the laboratory's research, the management team also established formal academic partnerships with Duke and five other institutions ‚ Florida State, Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech. Duke's participation was particularly championed by the late Charles Putman, senior vice president for research administration and policy who died last May of a heart attack.

Duke's participation in the consortium is being coordinated by Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Lew Siegel, and Trinity Dean of Natural Sciences Berndt Mueller.

Although they emphasize that contractual and other details are still being worked out, they say that the benefits of the Duke/ORNL relationship will likely include:

* support for three to five joint Duke/ORNL faculty appointments.

* support for undergraduate and graduate research at ORNL.

* access to a virtual teaching facility that could bring Duke courses to ORNL through high-speed Internet connections, and also give Duke students access to advanced science and engineering courses at other ORNL lead institutions.

* access to ORNL's advanced scientific instruments, most notably the "Spallation Neutron Source" (SNS) for engineering and biological studies. The SNS, which will become operational around 2005, will be the most powerful source of neutron beams in the world. Such neutron beams are invaluable probes of the structure and behavior of materials such as proteins and other biomolecules.

"This is a major opportunity for Duke to become involved in big science in areas where we have common interests with ORNL, without having to invest here on campus in a way that would be risky for Duke and not commensurate with our management capabilities," said Mueller.

The ORNL was first developed for the World War II Manhattan Project to produce material for nuclear weapons. A separately operated section of the laboratory still carries out this mission, but Duke will only be involved with the scientific section of the laboratory that concentrates on research on the environment, fusion energy, advanced computing, nuclear physics and renewable energy sources.

Key areas of Duke-ORNL collaboration, said Siegel and Mueller, will likely be functional genomics, which is the use of advanced analytical techniques to understand how genes and proteins work in the cell; nanotechnology, the area of materials science that explores the finest structure of materials and develops miniaturized electronic and biomedical devices; and

environmental research, including such areas as global climate change.

"As Duke moves from studies of local environmental issues to studies with a broader regional and national perspective, we would find such studies very difficult to carry out on campus," Mueller said. "However, ORNL has access to a research infrastructure that would greatly aid such larger-scale studies."