UT-ORII director to speak on STEM to Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory March 14
How Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee are aligning their resources to prepare future STEM talent will be explained on March 14 by Joan Bienvenue, executive director and vice provost of the University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute (UT-ORII).
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Bienvenue will be speaking at noon Tuesday to the in-person “hybrid” meeting hosted by Friends of ORNL at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Attendees may bring their own lunch to eat. To view the virtual noon lecture, click on the talk title on the homepage of the www.fornl.org website and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture.
Bienvenue supplied this summary of her upcoming talk.
“UT-ORII is aligning the best-of-the-best resources and expertise from ORNL and UT to prepare the next generation of talent in clean manufacturing, advanced materials, energy storage, transportation and other important areas to our state and to our nation. Along with becoming the nation’s standard for collaborative research and interdisciplinary education, UT-ORII will become a national model for workforce development.
"As new industries emerge and evolve, future STEM workers must be trained not only in their specialties, but also in a context that includes interdisciplinary problem solving, collaboration and real-world application.
“UT-ORII is committed to providing world-class STEM opportunities for students at each step of their educational pathway – from the nation’s only joint university-national laboratory doctoral programs and SMaRT undergraduate internships to our exciting, new, hands-on K-12 STEM programs.”
Bienvenue joined UT-ORII as its first executive director with the launch of the institute in 2021. She leads UT-ORII’s efforts to leverage UT and ORNL’s resources to establish a hub for world-class discovery and innovation, interdisciplinary graduate education and talent development.
Before joining UT-ORII, Bienvenue spent nearly eight years at the Applied Research Institute at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. As that agency’s first executive director, she worked to grow research, education and training, with an emphasis on global and national security.
Prior to that, she was program manager and chief scientist for the development of Lockheed Martin’s rapid DNA analysis platform. Bienvenue also worked as the supervisor of validation and quality control for the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory in Rockville, Maryland. She had been an ORISE Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the FBI.
Bienvenue holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree in forensic science from the University of New Haven, a master of business administration degree from the University of Mary Washington and a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Rivier University.
She is an American Academy of Forensic Sciences fellow. She was appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) board on Army Research and Development in 2019, where she has co-chaired several NASEM efforts. She is a member of the advisory boards for the Tickle College of Engineering at UT Knoxville and the UT One Health Initiative. She also serves on the East Tennessee Economic Council’s board of directors.
An avid runner, she has completed more than 40 marathons.
To learn more about UT-ORII, visit its website at www.utorii.com.
This article originally appeared on Oakridger: UT-ORII director to speak on STEM to Friends of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
