Partnering to Improve Diversity in the Fusion Workforce

The enormous scientific and technical challenge of rapidly developing fusion energy requires a significant growth of our workforce, and our success depends on our ability to attract and retain a broad array of talent. The FES-RENEW program is being utilized to improve excellence of research by connecting high quality candidates from Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) to summer-internship research in the Fusion Energy Division (FED) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). This program will focus on recruiting students that are geographically regional to ORNL to maximize interactions between the students and ORNL staff outside of the summer internship period. ORNL staff will provide introductory lectures at the MSIs during the academic year, intended to recruit students interested in fusion science and technology to apply for sponsored summer internships (typically 10 weeks) at ORNL. The close collaborative relationship between ORNL FED and the University of Tennessee-Knoxville (UTK) will be leveraged, as part of this program. Many UTK graduate students participate in directed-PhD research at ORNL. A 1-week intensive course at UTK on plasma science and fusion technologies will initiate the summer internship, taught in partnership with UTK professors and ORNL researchers. This will enable participating students (and faculty) to become familiar with graduate education opportunities relevant to fusion at UTK in Nuclear Engineering, Material Science, Mechanical Engineering, and interdisciplinary research. In this way, the ultimate objective of this program is to establish a sustained "pipeline" of undergraduate students from the participating MSIs (currently underrepresented in fusion science), to graduate opportunities (e.g. at UTK and collaboratively at ORNL), leading to career paths in fusion, thereby accomplishing the stated goal of FES-RENEW "to increase participation of underrepresented groups in FES's fusion and plasma science and technology research portfolio."