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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.

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

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

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

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 [email protected]. To discuss any of these capabilities, contact Kathy Rollow at [email protected]. For more information about ORAU, visit https://orau.org/

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

Stela Silva, Ph.D., an astrophysicist in the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, has her eye to the sky, sort of. Working with gravitational microlensing, which she says is "the physical phenomenon that happens when we're observing a star and then another star with a planet passes in front of it," and machine learning she looks for signatures of exoplanets. The chance of finding a star is one in a million, Silva says, and she and her fellow researchers look at millions of stars at the same time trying to detect exoplanets. Silva grew up in Brazil, where NASA seemed as far away as the stars she now studies. But she and her grandfather shared a loved of astronomy, and she worked hard toward her dream of being at NASA. To learn more about the NASA NPP Program, visit https://npp.orau.org/. The deadline for the March 2026 application cycle has been extended to 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 2, 2026.

Myron Porter is a section manager in ORAU’s Technical Solutions Group, which is part of ITS. In his role, he is a software developer working as part of the team that maintains and supports U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science web applications for National Science Bowl, the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program and the Laboratory Equipment Donation Program (LDEP). Host Michael Holtz talked to Porter as part of a two-part series on the people making Black History at ORAU. Porter says he got hooked on technology when his family set up their first computer and used AOL to access the internet. When he hears the phrase, “I am Black History,” he is mindful of the blood, sweat and tears that Black people before him have shed so he can have the life he lives today. He says his success is because of past generations. Porter hopes that when people look back on his life, they will see how he helped advance work in the scientific arena, and point to scientific breakthroughs that may have resulted because of the technology he helped support.

Rachel Hill, Ph.D., calls them angels: pastors, teachers, extended family members, neighbors who encourage us and cheer us on. The quiet encouragers who aren’t given and probably wouldn’t take credit for our successes. In honor of Black History Month, Further Together, the ORAU Podcast is featuring a two-part series of conversations with individuals making Black history at ORAU. For this episode, host Michael Holtz and special co-host Jill Latchana talk to Hill, an associate manager in STEM Workforce Development for ORISE, which is managed by ORAU for the U.S. Department of Energy. She discusses shift from academia to better focus on things she cherished. Hill shared her role in Black history, what it means to stand on the shoulders of her ancestors and what she hopes people will see in the story of her life.

Sara Howard, Ph.D., is an epidemiologist in the Health Studies group at ORAU who earned her doctoral degree in 2025. For part of her dissertation, she used machine learning techniques to analyze data from the National Supplemental Screening Program, which ORAU manages with several partners for the U.S. Department of Energy, to examine the link between chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and occupational exposures. While we often think of COPD in the context of smoking, Howard wanted to look at the potential to be exposed to something other than smoking. Her dissertation, An Epidemiologic Study of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in the United States, was published by the University of Tennessee in 2025. In this conversation, Howard talks about data in the context of epidemiology and the rising use of Artificial Intelligence and how, when used correctly, it can be transformative for data analysis. To learn more about the National Supplemental Screening Program, visit https://orau.org/nssp/index.html

Alka Rani, Ph.D., is a planetary scientist specializing in the geological and geophysical evolution of the moon and Mars. As a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Marshall Space Flight Center, she investigates planetary interiors and surface processes through advanced geophysical and geochemical modeling. In this episode of Further Together, Rani discusses her interdisciplinary research and what it may mean for future NASA missions to Mars and beyond. The NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) offers unique research opportunities to highly-talented U.S. and non-U.S. scientists to engage in ongoing NASA research projects at a NASA Center, NASA Headquarters, or at a NASA-affiliated research institute. These fellowships, awarded annually up to three years, are competitive and are designed to advance NASA’s missions in space science, Earth science, aeronautics, space operations, exploration systems, and astrobiology. Annual NASA Postdoctoral Program application deadlines are March 1, July 1, and November 1. The March 1, 2026 application cycle is now open! To learn more about the program and to apply, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html

Welding isn’t just a skill; it’s a national security asset. That’s why ORAU launched Extreme Trades Makeover: Future Welders, a competition to give $30,000 in new welding equipment, upgrades or virtual equipment to three Alabama public high school educators. The competition deadline is January 30, 2026. In this episode of Further Together, host Michael Holtz talks to Jennifer Tyrell, Extreme Trades program manager, and Lindsay Cline from the U.S. Navy's Maritime Industrial Base Program Office about the need for welders, their earning potential, and their critical role in the country’s maritime industry. Learn more about Extreme Trades Makeover: Future Welders and enter the competition at https://orau.org/extreme-trades/ Read our blog about the competition at https://orau.org/blog/programs/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-extreme-trades-makeover-future-welders-competition.html Learn more about shipbuilding careers in Alabama at https://www.buildgiantsalabama.com/ Find educational resources for your classroom at https://www.buildsubmarines.com/education

Lee Riedinger, Ph.D., knows the history of Oak Ridge and its connections to the University of Tennessee like he knows the back of his hand. His book, “Critical Connections: The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge from the Dawn of the Atomic Age to the Present,” explores the connections that exist between UT, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ORAU and other key stakeholders. In this episode of Further Together, Riedinger talks to hosts Michael Holtz and Amber Davis about ORAU’s role in the Oak Ridge story, including how ORNL may not have remained open were it not for the efforts of William Pollard, ORAU’s founder, Kay (Katherine) Way, a UT physics professor, and others to open up what was then Clinton Laboratories to a consortia of universities. Additionally, Riedinger explains that ORAU was instrumental in the creation of the UT-Battelle partnership that now manages ORNL. Check out this fascinating discussion of Riedinger’s career, his book, and ORAU’s vital role in keeping Oak Ridge at the forefront of science. Lee Riedinger is an emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, on the faculty since 1971 and retired in 2019, and also served as the founding Director of the Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education from 2010 to 2019. He received a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1968. His field of research was experimental nuclear physics, emphasizing properties of high-spin states in deformed nuclei. He is an author of 200 refereed publications, has given 60 invited talks at conferences and workshops, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research was funded by the Department of Energy for 30 years from 1976 and was focused on experiments at accelerators at U.S. national labs (Oak Ridge, Argonne, Berkeley, Brookhaven) and abroad. Various sabbatical leaves were spent at the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark. He served as the elected chair of the Division of Nuclear Physics of the APS in 1996 and the chair of the Southeastern Section of the APS in 2004. In 1983-84, he was the science advisor to Tennessee Senator Howard Baker, who was then the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. He received the UT Chancellor’s Research Scholar Award in 1983, the 2005 Francis G. Slack Award from the Southeastern Section of the APS, the 2008-9 Macebearer award (the top UT faculty honor), the Chancellor’s Medal in 2012, the L.R. Hesler Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service in 2013, and the Graduate Director of the Year in 2017 from the UT Graduate Student Senate. In addition to teaching and research, he has served in a number of administrative leadership positions at the university: 1988-91, director of the Science Alliance Center of Excellence, a program devoted to building joint research between UT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); 1991-95, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research; 1996–2000, head of the Physics Department; 2006-7 and again 2012, Vice Chancellor for Research. From 1993 to 1996, he was the first chair of the Tennessee Science and Technology Advisory Council, which advised the Governor and the Legislature on technical priorities for the state. In 1999 he was one of the leaders of the successful UT effort to choose a partner (Battelle) and bid on the ORNL management contract. From 2000 to 2004, he served as the ORNL Deputy Director for Science and Technology and from 2004 to 2006 as the Associate Laboratory Director for University Partnerships. UT-Battelle LLC has managed ORNL since 2000. Upon his return to the university in 2006, he led various efforts to develop a greater focus on energy teaching and research at UT. In September of 2010 he was appointed to be the first director of the UT-ORNL Bredesen Center, which is the academic home of a new doctoral program in energy science and engineering. In this role he taught the core two-semester graduate energy technology course and led all aspects of this interdisciplinary energy PhD program. A second interdisciplinary doctorate in data science and engineering between UT and ORNL started in August of 2017. He retired from UT at the end of 2019 and has written a book on the long history of the partnership between UT and Oak Ridge: Critical Connections: The University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge from the Dawn of the Atomic Age to the Present, published by UT Press in 2024. To learn more about the book, visit https://utpress.org/title/critical-connections/

Luke Fountain, Ph.D., who is in the third year of his NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship, makes a return to Further Together because of a recently published paper he co-authored on plant biology and space exploration. His research focus is figuring out how to grow plants in space to help enable future deep exploration. In this conversation, Fountain shares the challenges of plant biology in space, including the need to make growing systems self-sustaining. The paper he co-authored, published in the New Phytologist in November 2025, lays out a 12-point framework called the Bioregenerative Life Support System readiness level to assist in overcoming challenges to establish resilient, sustainable crop production. Fountain's paper, "Expanding frontiers: harnessing plant biology for space exploration and planetary sustainability," can be found here. https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.70662. New Phytologist is a leading international journal focusing on high quality, original research across the broad spectrum of plant sciences, from intracellular processes through to global environmental change. The journal is owned by the New Phytologist Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the promotion of plant science. https://www.newphytologist.org/ ORAU manages the NASA Postdoctoral Program for the National Aeronautic and Space Administration. To learn more about the program, meet some of the Fellows, or apply to become a Fellow, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html.

Are black soldier flies the superheroes of the insect world? This episode of Further Together takes a dive into an ORAU-Directed Research and Development Grant-funded project led by Holly Holt, Ph.D., ORAU research specialist, who teamed up with Jeff Tomberlin, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Etymology at Texas A&M University and Charity Owings, Ph.D., research assistant professor in the Department of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the University of Tennessee. Black soldier flies are said to be voracious decomposers, feeding off anything organic. As they feed, they convert organic waste into insect biomass that can be used as feed for various livestock, such as poultry, swine, and even pets. The residual that's left over after digestion is a replacement for chemical fertilizer. The team’s research includes laboratory research to understand what happens to black soldier flies under stress; and social sciences research to analyze new and emerging opportunities with black soldier fly products and services and the potential to disrupt existing markets, including Western acceptance of using black solider flies for feed, fertilizer and other products.