Further Together the ORAU Podcast

Patrick Shober, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, uses Doppler weather radar to detect and characterize meteorite falls in North America. Getting more information about meteorite falls increases the ability to collect these rocks that may have come from the moon or Mars or elsewhere. The goal of Shober’s fellowship is to improve the ability to track and locate meteorite falls, potentially automate the process, and improve the amount of information that ca

September is National Preparedness Month. What better time to talk about EM360, ORAU’s comprehensive emergency preparedness platform designed to help organizations manage the full cycle of preparedness activities in one place—from planning and exercise development to evaluation, corrective action tracking and continuous improvement. In this episode, Mary Connelly, ORAU manager of emergency management, discusses how EM360 can help any organization streamline the work of conducting emergency exerc

Maggie Weng, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, studies how life survives in super salty environments. She says one of her favorite things about doing this research is going to extreme environments to take samples from places on earth that exhibit the kinds of conditions that we're interested in studying. Those samples serve as analogs for what conditions might be like on other worlds or might have been like in the past. For example, Mars used to have a warmer and wetter climate, so she can study

People travel from all over the country to run the Secret City Half Marathon and 5K, a cool-weather race that starts on the waterfront at Melton Hill Lake and takes runners and walkers through the scenic streets of Oak Ridge. ORAU has been a proud sponsor of the Secret City races for many years. In this episode, host Michael Holtz is joined by fellow communications colleague and unofficial race ambassador Bryan Campbell and race director Hannah Fatheree for a conversation about the race, includi

Rural, underserved and minority populations are often not included or not represented in clinical and scientific research. Youssef Roman, PharmD, Ph.D., created the Community Advocacy and Research Empowerment (CARE) Coalition to change that. Youssef received an ORAU Innovation Partnership Grant while at Idaho State University to create the coalition, which brings together stakeholders committed to including rural, underserved and minority populations in research. Youssef hopes to replicate the C

Vit Ruzicka, Ph.D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Program Fellow who works with hyperspectral satellite images to detect methane signatures in the atmosphere. Methane is a transparent gas that cannot be seen by the human eye but hyperspectral satellites, along with machine learning models, can help determine if there are leaks in facilities or pipelines that store methane. Because methane is a greenhouse gas, detecting large emissions is important. In addition to his research focus, Ruzicka shares his