DURING THE SUMMER of 2001, faculty from some minority-serving colleges and universities had the opportunity to work on some big research projects at ORNL, thanks to the HBCU/MEI Summer Faculty Research Program. The program - a joint effort between ORNL and ORAU - brought seven professors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and other Minority Educational Institutions (MEIs) to the lab for 10 weeks.

HBCUs, like North Carolina A&T State University where Dr. Dhananjay Kumar is a researcher, typically don't have resources comparable to those of a large research institution. After working at the University of Florida, being at an HBCU "is a different experience," said Kumar. "HBCUs don't have a lot of money and don't have a lot of facilities," he explained.

This program exemplifies how Kumar negotiates a lack of resources. "For a lot of things, I have to collaborate," he said. Collaborating with ORNL gave Kumar the chance to work in the Solid State Division of ORNL with Stephen Pennycook and use one of the five most powerful electron microscopes in the world.

"It was one of the best experiences on the scientific front of my life," Kumar asserted.

Kumar especially appreciated the chance to use ORNL's electron microscope for his research on nanoscale characteristics of nanoparticles. Such particles, that are "the size of atoms," are "hard to characterize."

Kumar described the power of getting such a rare close look at the particles he worked with. "If I tell you Michael Jordan is a great basketball player, you want to see him play. [With the electron microscope] you can see the atoms . . . and characterize them at the atomic level."

The summer research program is a "very useful program for people who need educational opportunities," said Kumar.

The benefits of the program are not all for the faculty participants. Pennycook explained that it is "good for us [ORNL researchers] to have some change of view." With the "interesting results" and "new directions" his work with Kumar afforded, Pennycook hopes for longer term collaboration in the future.