Further Together the ORAU Podcast

Greg Nichols is operations manager in the ORAU health studies program, but he wears a lot of hats. He has become an expert in artificial intelligence and received an ORAU Thought Leadership Research Award to write a chapter on the convergence of AI and biotechnology. Nichols’s chapter, “Assessing Governance and Regulatory Frameworks for Converging Technologies: The Case of Artificial Intelligence in Biological Engineering and Design Technologies,” appears in Biotechnology and AI: Technological Convergence and Information Hazards. He says that While biotechnologies are somewhat better regulated and monitored compared to other technologies, artificial intelligence is not, and the combination of these two is certainly not explicitly or fully covered by most existing regulations or risk governance framework. This was an insightful and thought-provoking conversation.



To learn more about the chapter Nichols wrote, visit https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-05246-9_8



Find the book at https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-05246-9

The annual Waste Management Symposia (March 8-12, 2026, in Phoenix, Arizona) is the premier international conference concerning the safe and secure management of radioactive wastes arising from nuclear operations, facility decommissioning and environmental remediation, as well as storage, transportation and disposal, and associated activities. A team of ORAU subject matter experts will be attending this year’s event. In this episode of Further Together, Kathy Rollow, senior director for Energy and International Strategy, and Chelsea Hill, manager of Workforce Solutions, discuss why Waste Management 2026 is an important opportunity for ORAU to share its capabilities with leading agencies, industries and experts in the nuclear energy sector.



At WM 2026, the ORAU team will share information about staffing and recruiting Workforce Solutions, organizational and safety culture evaluations, PeerNet—our proprietary decision-making tool, Emergency Manager 360, Exercise Builder Nuclear and Exercise Builder Energy.



To learn more about Workforce Solutions, contact Chelsea Hill at [email protected].



To discuss any of these capabilities, contact Kathy Rollow at [email protected].



For more information about ORAU, visit https://orau.org/

Kelly Whalen, Ph.D., studies black holes and how they interact with galaxy growth as part of her research for the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Whalen says there are a lot of misconceptions about black holes because of pop culture and science fiction depictions. There are different kinds of black holes, and they are not gigantic forces of destruction. She tells Further Together, The ORAU Podcast that black holes can also create by forming new stars. Whalen says being selected for the NASA NPP program is a dream come true and looks forward to continuing her research.



The deadline for the NASA NPP March application cycle has been extended to April 2, 2026. Learn more at https://npp.orau.org/index.html

Stela Silva, Ph.D., an astrophysicist in the NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, has her eye to the sky, sort of. Working with gravitational microlensing, which she says is "the physical phenomenon that happens when we're observing a star and then another star with a planet passes in front of it," and machine learning she looks for signatures of exoplanets. The chance of finding a star is one in a million, Silva says, and she and her fellow researchers look at millions of stars at the same time trying to detect exoplanets. Silva grew up in Brazil, where NASA seemed as far away as the stars she now studies. But she and her grandfather shared a loved of astronomy, and she worked hard toward her dream of being at NASA.



To learn more about the NASA NPP Program, visit https://npp.orau.org/. The deadline for the March 2026 application cycle has been extended to 5 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 2, 2026.

Myron Porter is a section manager in ORAU’s Technical Solutions Group, which is part of ITS. In his role, he is a software developer working as part of the team that maintains and supports U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science web applications for National Science Bowl, the Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) program and the Laboratory Equipment Donation Program (LDEP). Host Michael Holtz talked to Porter as part of a two-part series on the people making Black History at ORAU. Porter says he got hooked on technology when his family set up their first computer and used AOL to access the internet. When he hears the phrase, “I am Black History,” he is mindful of the blood, sweat and tears that Black people before him have shed so he can have the life he lives today. He says his success is because of past generations. Porter hopes that when people look back on his life, they will see how he helped advance work in the scientific arena, and point to scientific breakthroughs that may have resulted because of the technology he helped support.