The Scientific Fellows Program was part of the Institute for Nuclear Security until 2020. Afterwards, it remained under the direction of Dr. Deborah Penchoff during her appointment at the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy. The program provides a highly synergistic environment with the goal of finding solutions to problems of relevance in national and global security. As part of the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy, our research is at the intersection of policy and technology and it involves many traditional fields in a collaborative environment involving faculty, scientific staff, and students from various programs at universities, national laboratories, and others across the nation.

Our research projects have focused on separations of Rare Earth Elements (REEs), lanthanides and actinides, investigations relevant to critical materials and the shortage of REEs, radiochemistry, radiotherapy for cancer treatment, nuclear forensics, and nuclear waste, amongst others. Our team strives to finding solutions by overlapping traditional fields such as data science, computer science, chemistry, mathematics, materials science, physics, public policy, and social science in innovative collaborative environments to address national and global challenges.