The research we do is to look at how radiation reacts with materials.
You can envision this as how a billiard ball collides with other billiard balls
on a pool table, that is how radiation reacts with atoms in the materials.
It basically knocks them around in the structure and sometimes they come back together and sometimes they don't.
That’s very critical for nuclear energy applications or nuclear waste forms
where we want to be able to predict where we want to predict the performance of those materials in nuclear reactors.
for thirty or sixty years or in nuclear waste forms where we may need
to predict the behavior of the materials over 10,000 or one million years, depending on what the regulators may eventually decide
We are building a new ion accelerator lab. Once that comes online, I think we will have a very unique capability,
that will contribute both to research on campus and to research at Oak Ridge National Lab.
I am very excited about this opportunity to both come back to the university culture
and academic life and also have opportunity to interact very closely with Oak Ridge National Laboratory,
which is one of the premier laboratories in the world
for materials research. So if I couple that with the materials science engineering program at the University of Tennessee, I see limitless opportunities
in the research we can do and the opportunities we can provide students and their training.