UT-ORII Fellow: Economics and Employment Modeler

Requisition Id 14104 

 

Overview: 

 

As a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science national laboratory, ORNL has an extraordinary 80-year history of solving the nation’s biggest problems. We have a dedicated and creative staff of over 7,000 people! Our vision for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) is to cultivate an environment and practices that foster diversity in ideas and in the people across the organization, as well as to ensure ORNL is recognized as a workplace of choice. These elements are critical for enabling the execution of ORNL’s broader mission to accelerate scientific discoveries and their translation into energy, environment, and security solutions for the nation.

 

The Energy Science and Technology Directorate (ESTD) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is seeking a talented and assertive researcher to lead studies on the local and regional economic and employment impacts of future policies and market actions expanding the global bioeconomy and driving toward carbon neutrality at the national and global levels. A particular focus will be on local solutions (resources, innovations, manufacturing, workforce development) that support a sustainable and sustainable transition toward a circular bioeconomy in the Southeastern United States. There is also broader scope for extending analyses to a variety of other energy and environmental solutions that may be deployed in the region over the coming decades (e.g., bioenergy, renewable and nuclear power, electric vehicle and battery manufacturing, critical minerals mining and recycling, additive manufacturing, and more).  Strong emphasis will be placed on the use of innovative methodologies to better represent human capital in forward-looking economic/employment models, including collaborating with social scientists and political economists to incorporate empirical data (quantitative and qualitative) on labor availability and the needs for workforce (re-)training programs.

 

The Buildings and Transportation Science Division (BTSD) at ORNL drives scientific discoveries and technological advancements to accelerate transformative solutions for sustainable energy in building and transportation sectors. Within BTSD sits the Transportation Analytics & Decision Sciences (TADS) Group, which studies how new transportation and energy technologies impact social, economic, infrastructure, and technological systems. The group’s research focuses on, among other things, transitions, examining long-term, multi-decade changes and how various systems evolve through human choices. The researchers address questions such as the introduction of electric vehicles, low-carbon energy, alternative fuel adoption's impact on infrastructure and the grid, and how social and urban factors influence the adoption of new technologies and energy-mobility paradigms. The multidisciplinary teams within TADS apply advanced modeling, machine learning, and data analytics to project future transportation and energy performance, optimize infrastructure, and inform decision-makers about sustainable pathways. Their work supports public and private sector leaders with data and models, producing impactful tools like interactive data visualizations, transportation-energy scenarios, and widely-used resources such as the Transportation Energy Data Book, MA3T vehicle choice model, and the Bioenergy KDF.

This position will be associated with the UT-Oak Ridge Innovation Institute’s Circular Bioeconomy Systems (CBS) Convergent Research Initiative (CRI), a unique collaboration between ORNL and the University of Tennessee. The CBS CRI mission is to develop transformative strategies for managing, valorizing, and extending the lifetime of each carbon atom. They aim to use emerging science to produce biomaterials from sustainable carbon sources, pioneering the shift toward low-energy and low-carbon-intensity agriculture, and manufacturing. At full strength, the CBS CRI will add ~20 new investigators at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the University of Tennessee Institute of Agriculture (UTIA), and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK). The CBS CRI supports its interdisciplinary researchers by offering networking opportunities with fellow scientists and bioeconomy stakeholders, facilitating collaborative experiments and proposal development, providing