Further Together the ORAU Podcast

Tracy Boatner, President and CEO of the East Tennessee Economic Council, is also a member of the ORAU Board of Directors. She says she was honored to be invited to join the board and has tremendous appreciation for ORAU’s long-standing role as a force for workforce development in Oak Ridge and across the country. In this conversation, Boatner and Further Together host Michael Holtz discuss how these are exciting times for a city that stands at the center of the nuclear renaissance and how ETEC helps foster relationships among all of the stakeholders in the community.



To learn more about ETEC, visit https://www.eteconline.org/

Patrick Shober, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Fellow at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, uses Doppler weather radar to detect and characterize meteorite falls in North America. Getting more information about meteorite falls increases the ability to collect these rocks that may have come from the moon or Mars or elsewhere. The goal of Shober’s fellowship is to improve the ability to track and locate meteorite falls, potentially automate the process, and improve the amount of information that can be extracted from Doppler weather radar. Shober is nearing the end of his fellowship. His immediate plans include a trip to Antarctica to search for meteorites, and in 2027 will go to work for the NEO Surveyor, a NASA space-based infrared telescope designed to detect and track potentially hazardous asteroids and comets near Earth.
Earlier this year, Shober had a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal on studying asteroidal activity among meteor datasets. The paper can be found here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ae4bde
To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program and to apply for opportunities during the November 2026 application cycle, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html
To learn more about ORAU, visit https://orau.org/

September is National Preparedness Month. What better time to talk about EM360, ORAU’s comprehensive emergency preparedness platform designed to help organizations manage the full cycle of preparedness activities in one place—from planning and exercise development to evaluation, corrective action tracking and continuous improvement. In this episode, Mary Connelly, ORAU manager of emergency management, discusses how EM360 can help any organization streamline the work of conducting emergency exercises without adding administrative burden.



To learn more about EM360 or to request a demonstration, visit https://www.orau.org/technology-products/emergency-manager-360.html

Maggie Weng, Ph.D., NASA Postdoctoral Fellow, studies how life survives in super salty environments. She says one of her favorite things about doing this research is going to extreme environments to take samples from places on earth that exhibit the kinds of conditions that we're interested in studying. Those samples serve as analogs for what conditions might be like on other worlds or might have been like in the past. For example, Mars used to have a warmer and wetter climate, so she can study places on earth that might have resembled ancient Mars.

To learn more about the NASA Postdoctoral Program and apply for the November application cycle, visit https://npp.orau.org/index.html.

People travel from all over the country to run the Secret City Half Marathon and 5K, a cool-weather race that starts on the waterfront at Melton Hill Lake and takes runners and walkers through the scenic streets of Oak Ridge. ORAU has been a proud sponsor of the Secret City races for many years. In this episode, host Michael Holtz is joined by fellow communications colleague and unofficial race ambassador Bryan Campbell and race director Hannah Fatheree for a conversation about the race, including talk about the course, how to train for a half marathon, the great organization that benefits from race proceeds, and more. BTW, you can still register for the race here: Secret City Half Marathon and 5K