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ORAU announces 36 Powe Award research grants for 2025-2026 academic year

ORAU has awarded competitive research grants totaling $180,000 to 36 junior faculty from its member institutions. The annual grants are made through the company’s Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards program, which provides seed grants to enrich the research and professional growth of young faculty.

Learn more about the Powe Awards

Alexander Bataller, 2020 ORAU Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award winner studies the use of molten salts for advanced nuclear power applications

Oak Ridge Associated Universities

For more than 75 years, we have helped our customers advance their mission by providing science, health, and workforce solutions. Through our specialized teams of experts and a consortium of more than 160 universities, we connect the right people and resources to help our customers solve our nation’s most challenging issues.

ORAU Highlights

Podcast

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Making America healthy again will take all of us: A conversation with Brenda Blunt, senior director of health policy

Brenda Blunt, ORAU senior director of health policy, is passionate about the connections between nutrition and both physical and mental health. She is a mom, grandmother, wife, nurse, primal health coach, farmer and policy wonk. Blunt says all of those roles together make health and how we can better care for ourselves important to her. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, rolls out his plan to Make America Healthy Again, much of the focus is on the role of better nutrition and its connection to health. Blunt was MAHA before it was cool, and often leans into the teachings of Florence Nightingale, who advocated for a holistic view of health that emphasized the importance of fresh air, clean water, efficient drainage, cleanliness of patients and care areas, and sunlight. In this conversation, Blunt and hosts Michael Holtz and Matthew Underwood discuss how we got to being one of the richest countries in the world and one of the least healthy, how we didn’t get here overnight, how government agencies can work together to help Americans make better choices, and how we can individually and collectively take steps to make ourselves and the country healthier.

Impact Areas

Going Further. Together.

ORAU is impacting national priorities in science, health, and education. Our research enterprise and the more than 160 major Ph.D.-granting institutions that comprise our university consortium help keep ORAU and the nation on the leading edge of science and technology. Likewise, the scientific and technical solutions we provide to our customers have impacted our nation and the world.