Curiosity, discovery, learning. It’s a thirst to pursue great discoveries and answer big questions. This passion for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education and research changes lives, makes our nation stronger, and opens a doorway to opportunity and endless possibilities. This enthusiasm for pursuit of new knowledge not only inspires our own work, it instills in all of us a comforting confidence about the future of America’s scientific endeavors. Together, we are finding answers and leading innovations, and our breakthroughs are igniting ideas across disciplines while fueling economic innovation.
Our culture is geared towards the future, it breeds and embodies our everlasting drive to developing the next big breakthrough. Simply said by Peter Drucker, and others, the best way to predict the future is to create it, build it and invent it. We in the National Labs are focused on the future while delivering today.
I am proud to be a product of a STEM education, of being a strong STEM advocate, and most proud to be a part of an agency that has a solid record of encouraging people to pursue STEM studies. At the National Energy Technology Laboratory, our workforce is creating knowledge that is the basic building blocks from which scientific innovation is inspired, generated, and fulfilled.
The DOE National Lab enterprise represents a system of intellectual assets unique among world scientific institutions. It is an interconnected, collaborative technical system like no other. STEM researchers at our National Labs provide the theory, tools and techniques that lead to revolutionary innovations like advancing technologies for cleaner, more efficient engines, kick-starting development of the worldwide web, and jump-starting the shale gas revolution.
All of us at the DOE National Lab enterprise are developing the innovations and breakthroughs that have the power to change people’s lives in meaningful ways, and inventing, discovering, and engineering devices and systems that we never dreamed were possible, but couldn’t imagine living without—this is the power of STEM education.
