Join your host Michael Holtz as he discuss all things ORAU, through interviews with our experts who provide innovative scientific and technical solutions for our customers. Michael and his guests will talk about ORAU’s storied history, how we’re impacting an ever-changing world, as well as our commitment to our community.
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June 4, 2026Episode 1521 min
Geeks of the world, unite!: A conversation with Gabe Grell, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Fellow
Gabe Grell, Ph.D., is a self-described geek. He is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow focused on high-energy astrophysics, which involves observing some of the most powerful objects in the universe, including massive stars (10 to 20 times bigger than our sun), black holes, galaxies and supernovae, all of which emit very strong radiation in the form of X-rays. Grell analyzed the data received from satellites measuring these X-rays to deduce the atomic makeup and physical properties of those objects. Grell says he has always a math and science geek and began taking an interest in astronomy in high school. He majored in astrophysics and physics at Harvard University, then pursued his Ph.D. at the University of Maryland College Park. To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html.
May 20, 2026Episode 1622 min
Studying clouds on the sun: A conversation with Veronika Jercic, Ph.D., NASA NPP Fellow
Veronika Jercic, Ph.D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She studies structures in the solar atmosphere known as prominences or filaments. Jercic calls them clouds on the sun. These clouds are important to understand stretch through all of sun’s atmospheric layers. Unlike the clouds on Earth, these clouds are much denser, so they're very heavy clouds and colder than the Corona in which they are situated. These clouds occasionally erupt, expelling huge masses of particles and energy into the interplanetary space, which see them as the Northern Lights. These energy masses can also impact satellite transmissions, which negatively affect our technologically driven world. To learn more about the NASA NPP Program, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html
May 13, 2026Episode 1531 min
A 6-year-old's dream of becoming a physicist came true: A conversation with Maurice Roots, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow
Maurice Roots, Ph.D., was six years old when he watched “Star Trek” and decided to be a physicist. His dream came true and today he is an atmospheric physicist in the NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow researching atmospheric chemistry and dynamics at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Specifically, Roots focuses on ozone, which is one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s six critical pollutants. He says we need to measure and be concerned about ozone because of the health risks associated with how ozone impacts air quality and breathing it in, adding that ozone isn’t directly emitted from anything specific but formed in the air secondarily. Roots discusses why his research is important, what it means for all of us, and the career and education path that led him to NASA.
To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and to enter the November application cycle, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html
May 6, 2026Episode 1427 min
Meeting the need for skilled trades workers in the nuclear energy industry: ORAU's Pathway to Trades Summit
Oak Ridge is at the nexus of the nuclear energy renaissance. One of the challenges is meeting the demand for the necessary workforce, and not just the scientific and technical workforce but the skilled trades workers needed to build out and operate the small modular reactors and other facilities that are coming. On Thursday, May 14, ORAU is hosting the Pathway to Trades Summit, which will convene industry, trade unions, academia, government and other key players to begin to solve for meeting this important need. Laura Hammons, strategic programs and operations manager for the ORAU STEM Accelerator and key organizer of the summit, sits down with Michael Holtz to discuss why the Summit is important, what participants can expect, and what she hopes will happen next.
To learn more about the Pathway to Trades Summit or to register for this free event, visit https://orau.org/pathway-to-trades/index.html
April 22, 2026Episode 1357 min
Take to the bed, bring a cake and remember your value: A conversation with Naomi Asher, The Maven
If you take anything away from this podcast episode, Naomi Asher wants you to know you are enough, you are worthy and you have value. In this episode of Further Together, Naomi and host Michael Holtz talk about career burnout, the need for rest and recovery, and finding yourself in the process. Naomi is the author of the book, “Take to the Bed (And Bring a Cake),” about the importance of giving yourself permission to rest when life gets overwhelming (and life gets overwhelming at times), evaluate whether what you do and how you present yourself to the world aligns with who you are, and make adjustments as necessary. This conversation takes place in the context of the wide variety of career opportunities that exist in the growing nuclear energy industry in East Tennessee. Be trained in a trade, get a community college education, make a mid- to late-career shift that better aligns with your values – the possibilities are endless.
Naomi is the founder and principal of The Maven Consulting. Learn more about Naomi The Maven here: https://www.naomithemaven.com/about
Naomi is a long-time resident of East Tennessee. She attended Johnson University where she graduated with a double major in Music and Theology. She was hired as the Executive Director of CASA of the Tennessee Heartland in 2010. While there she expanded the geographic service area, more than doubled the budget, created an endowment and reserve as well as increased volunteer numbers by double and retention rates from 41% to 92%. Naomi served on the Tennessee CASA Board and as a Regional Coordinator which allowed her to win and administer grants for the East Region as well as create regional marketing campaigns. She graduated from King University with her MBA in Marketing in 2012.
In May of 2015, she was hired as the Executive Director of the United Way of Anderson, Campbell, Morgan and Scott Counties where she increased the budget by 42% as well as the geographic service area. She revised and rebuilt the grant-making process as well as created several community initiatives. She implemented annual Community Needs Assessments and provided technical training and support to other nonprofits. She is passionate about helping others thrive.
Naomi is the Founder and Principal Consultant at The Maven Consulting and Doctoral Candidate at Carolina University where she is researching Nonprofit Executive Burnout.
Naomi is a graduate of the Consortium for Social Enterprise Effectiveness through the University of Tennessee, Leadership Oak Ridge, Leadership Anderson County, and East Tennessee Regional Leadership Association. She is the Chair of Explore Oak Ridge, Past-President of the Rotary Club of Oak Ridge, Past-President of the Altrusa Club of Oak Ridge, a founding member of the Anderson County Young Professionals, a board member of the Oak Ridge Center for Leadership and Community Development and the Oak Ridge Land Bank. She has served as the President of the United Ways of Tennessee and as a Regional Representative on the TN CASA Association Board.
In 2017 she was named the Anderson County Chamber Young Professional of the Year, was the 2018 recipient of the East Tennessee Economic Council’s Postma Young Professional Medal and the 2021 Oak Ridge Chamber Young Professional of the Year.
She lives and plays in Oak Ridge with her husband Ryan, dog Winnie, and 3 cats Jerome, Miley and Rhaenyra. They are a foster family with a heart for teenagers.
April 8, 2026Episode 1220 min
Dreaming in space: A conversation with Ricardo Branco, Ph.D., NASA NPP Fellow
Ricardo Branco, Ph.D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on the development of detectors that can detect infrared or thermal radiation from very cold bodies throughout the solar system – think Uranus or the moon. Capturing the infrared radiation allows scientists to detect the chemical composition and other aspects of the body they are studying. Branco is a native of Brazil who has been interested in science since childhood. As a kid Branco wanted to be a doctor but fell in love with physics in high school. The rest, as they say, is history. While he never dreamed he’d be at NASA, he is excited about his research and the potential it holds to be part of future NASA flagship missions to orbit Uranus.
To learn more about the NASA NPP program, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html
April 1, 2026Episode 1118 min
Cultivate your curiosity: A conversation with Kirtan Dixit, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow
Kirtan Dixit, Ph.D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow in the second year of his fellowship at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He is part of the high-energy astrophysics, high-energy optics group on advances X-ray optics for future space telescopes. His research focuses on designing and fabricating multilayer mirror coating that can efficiently reflect hard X-rays. In this interview, he tells guest host Amber Davis that X-ray optical coatings are useful for focusing X-rays so that astrophysicists can make some sense out of it and can understand the underlying physics happening at high temperatures in the universe. For scientists who might want to pursue a NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, Kirtan recommends cultivating a deep curiosity about a problem that genuinely matters to you.
To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html
March 11, 2026Episode 1037 min
Information hazards of the AI and biotechnology convergence: A conversation with Greg Nichols
Greg Nichols is operations manager in the ORAU health studies program, but he wears a lot of hats. He has become an expert in artificial intelligence and received an ORAU Thought Leadership Research Award to write a chapter on the convergence of AI and biotechnology. Nichols’s chapter, “Assessing Governance and Regulatory Frameworks for Converging Technologies: The Case of Artificial Intelligence in Biological Engineering and Design Technologies,” appears in Biotechnology and AI: Technological Convergence and Information Hazards. He says that While biotechnologies are somewhat better regulated and monitored compared to other technologies, artificial intelligence is not, and the combination of these two is certainly not explicitly or fully covered by most existing regulations or risk governance framework. This was an insightful and thought-provoking conversation.
To learn more about the chapter Nichols wrote, visit https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05246-9_8
Find the book at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-05246-9
March 5, 2026Episode 928 min
Sharing our capabilities on an international level: ORAU and the 2026 Waste Management Symposia
The annual Waste Management Symposia (March 8-12, 2026, in Phoenix, Arizona) is the premier international conference concerning the safe and secure management of radioactive wastes arising from nuclear operations, facility decommissioning and environmental remediation, as well as storage, transportation and disposal, and associated activities. A team of ORAU subject matter experts will be attending this year’s event. In this episode of Further Together, Kathy Rollow, senior director for Energy and International Strategy, and Chelsea Hill, manager of Workforce Solutions, discuss why Waste Management 2026 is an important opportunity for ORAU to share its capabilities with leading agencies, industries and experts in the nuclear energy sector.
At WM 2026, the ORAU team will share information about staffing and recruiting Workforce Solutions, organizational and safety culture evaluations, PeerNet—our proprietary decision-making tool, Emergency Manager 360, Exercise Builder Nuclear and Exercise Builder Energy.
To learn more about Workforce Solutions, contact Chelsea Hill at chelsea.hill@orau.org.
To discuss any of these capabilities, contact Kathy Rollow at kathy.rollow@orau.org.
For more information about ORAU, visit https://orau.org/
February 25, 2026Episode 820 min
Being selected for the NASA Postdoctoral Program is a dream come true for Kelly Whalen, Ph.D.
Kelly Whalen, Ph.D., studies black holes and how they interact with galaxy growth as part of her research for the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Whalen says there are a lot of misconceptions about black holes because of pop culture and science fiction depictions. There are different kinds of black holes, and they are not gigantic forces of destruction. She tells Further Together, The ORAU Podcast that black holes can also create by forming new stars. Whalen says being selected for the NASA NPP program is a dream come true and looks forward to continuing her research.
The deadline for the NASA NPP March application cycle has been extended to April 2, 2026. Learn more at https://npp.orau.org/index.html
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