The Nuclear Energy Academic Roadmap (NEAR) is a collaborative effort aimed at strengthening the future of nuclear education and workforce capacity building in the United States. Led by the ORAU STEM Accelerator, this roadmap represents the combined expertise and dedication of educators, industry leaders, government agencies and other stakeholders working together to address one of the most pressing challenges facing the nuclear energy sector – building a skilled and resilient workforce.
Our story is built around the lifecycle of scientific and technical workers—a broad range of STEM and technical professionals—and encompasses five distinct phases: discovery, development, connection, support and strengthening.
Veronika Jercic, Ph.D., is a NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. She studies structures in the solar atmosphere known as prominences or filaments. Jercic calls them clouds on the sun. These clouds are important to understand stretch through all of sun’s atmospheric layers. Unlike the clouds on Earth, these clouds are much denser, so they're very heavy clouds and colder than the Corona in which they are situated. These clouds occasionally erupt, expelling huge masses of particles and energy into the interplanetary space, which see them as the Northern Lights. These energy masses can also impact satellite transmissions, which negatively affect our technologically driven world. To learn more about the NASA NPP Program, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html
For more than 80 years, ORAU has served as a trusted partner to our government customers, our university consortium members, and our local community. In this video, you can meet some of the people behind the ORAU name.
