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Wendy Dafoe serves as the Clean Cities task leader at NREL, working closely with staff at the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) to advance the Clean Cities sustainable transportation mission. This June, the Energy Department recognized Dafoe with an award for her long-lasting commitment to advancing the Clean Cities mission.Transportation leader roots career in true grit

In 1994, Wendy Dafoe clocked in as a temp at DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and began work on what would become the Energy Department’s Clean Cities Alternative Fuels Data Center (AFDC). Twenty years later, Dafoe is still here, but in a full-time capacity as senior project leader helping steer the program. Some would call it commitment, some would point to a planetary alignment—but others might suspect it has something to do with the true grit Dafoe developed in her time with the mining industry.

Dafoe interprets it as kismet, saying: “Somehow, I lucked into connecting with Clean Cities, and the program has become an incredible success story for EERE. Since its inception, the leadership at Clean Cities has steered the program to build an impressive network of coalitions who establish public-private partnerships, leading to exponential growth.”

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Cyber Defenders interns attend a network security class, where each week they learn about a different tool and use it to complete an exercise.A dynamic introduction to cybersecurity (internal and external)

Celeste Matarazzo was attending a cybersecurity conference when she was struck with a realization: the field of cybersecurity had a diversity problem.

Matarazzo noted: “It’s about more than racial or gender diversity—it’s about diversity of thought. Both cybercrime and cybersecurity are only limited by imagination, and we as a nation can’t be secure without a diverse set of problem solvers to counter the cyber threat.”

No stranger to educational outreach, she speculated that a fun yet practical introduction to cybersecurity might encourage more students to pursue careers in the discipline. In 2009, with support from DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, she established a Cyber Defenders summer internship program to provide hands-on training to potential future cyber security experts; she now shares program leadership duties with Evi Dube, of LLNL's Computing Applications and Research department.

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DOE Pulse
  • Number 420  |
  • August 18, 2014
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    The distinctive collaboration stemmed from a fertile environment at the Department of Energy's lead laboratory for nuclear energy research and development. That environment enabled an engineer and a computational scientist to easily work hand-in-hand toward a common goal. Their collaboration is noteworthy "because computer people and experimental scientists don't tend to interact much," said Michael Tonks.

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    “Biomass burning and wildfires emit fine particulates that are toxic to humans and can warm or cool climate. While their toxicity is certain, their specific climatic effects remain unclear and are a hot research topic,” said Manvendra Dubey, a senior Los Alamos climate scientist. “Smoke from wildfires accounts for one-third of the Earth’s ‘black’ carbon — the familiar charred particles that are associated with fires with large flames. While black carbon is relatively simple — solely consisting of carbon — brown carbon contains a complex soup of organic material, making it difficult to identify, characterize and model.”

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    To eliminate the extreme cooling and high pressures used to separate ethylene and ethane, an international team of scientists, including researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, designed a sorbent that greatly prefers ethylene. Specialized windshield glass, everyday plastic water bottles, and countless other products are based on ethylene, a simple two-carbon molecule, which requires an energy-intense separation process to pluck the desired chemical away from nearly identical ethane. To eliminate the extreme cooling required in the separation, an international team including researchers at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory designed a material with a porous framework that greatly prefers ethylene. What makes this material particularly potent is that the highly selective sorbent is stable in air and water. In addition, the framework offers a high surface area that speeds the sorting. The material contains silver that binds with the electrons around ethylene's double-bonded carbon atoms. These electrons are known as π electrons or the π cloud.

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