Like most land grant universities, The University of Tennessee Knoxville is the state's public flagship university.  It focuses on educating the best students, while trying to keep them in Tennessee, preventing a brain drain. When it comes to scientific research, however, UT has a lot more to offer than the typical state school.

Since the end of WWII UT has been in close partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL), one of 17 national laboratories in the country.  It was born out of the Manhattan Project like many other national labs such as Los Alamos in New Mexico. 

UT, in partnership with Battelle Memorial Institute, has managed the lab for the Department of Energy since winning the contract in 2000.  This makes UT one of the few academic establishments in the country to manage a national lab, and puts it in the same field as the University of California Berkeley and the University of Chicago.

"The best people in the world, you know, come to the University of Tennessee," said Witold Nazarewicz, a nuclear physics theorist and professor at UT.  "If not for ORNL, UT would be just a typical state university, which would be mainly focused on teaching and undergraduate education.  What makes UT a very special place is this research component and ORNL."  

Having access to these world-class facilities draws many of the best scientific minds to East Tennessee and UT.  Some stay only for a short time, while others join the staff of the university.           

This is what brought Nazarewicz to The University of Tennessee in the first place.  He got his Ph.d. in physics from the Warsaw Institute of Technology, but, during a sabbatical to do research in the U.S., he was enticed to stay because of what was happening at ORNL.

"My main motivation was building this beast (referring to the Facility for Radioactive Ion Beams)," said Nazarewicz. "This big wonderful machine.  I am a theorist so I worked very hard to establish why this was exciting, why it is important.  And then I was so involved that I asked for a leave of absence from Warsaw, and soon afterwards I got full professorship here."

UT also draws in many graduate students to its physics program, such as Jordan McDonnell, because of its expertise in nuclear physics and the proximity ORNL.

"(I chose UT) mostly because of the connection to the Oak Ridge Laboratory, it's a great professional connection," said McDonnell. But he was also interested in UT because of the research opportunities UT would not have with out ORNL.  One such opportunity is the Cray xt5 Jaguar supercomputer.

"It was defiantly a draw in picking this university, it is pretty interactive, just being able to see calculations pan out the way you hoped they would in just a few hours," said McDonnell.

The Jaguar is currently rank second on the list of fastest supercomputers open for scientific research.  There is also another Supercomputer called the Kraken, which is whole own by UT, but is located at ORNL.

Students not only have access to these super fast machines, but also can perform research at many of ORNL's National User Facilities such as the Holifield Radioactive Ion Beam, which is directed by Dr. Nazarewicz.  Another is the Spallation Neutron Source.

"There are many opportunities.  Actually most of our students do real hands on work.  They put together experiments, or they put together various pieces of equipment needed for the data.  They construct new equipment and detectors, or they work on the data with specialized software.  Students are very much involved," said Nazarewicz.

He continued, "It is unlike in other user facilities where a student comes and hands in a tape or disk, and after two days he gets, you know, a bunch of data that he or she needs to analyze at home.  Here they can really get some feel about real life in nuclear physics.  They spend nights on shifts running machines, working with operators trying to optimize the beam etc."

This means that UT does not only offer its graduate students an experience that they can receive in few other places, but it also means that undergraduates are being taught physics and science by some of the smartest minds in the country while being TA'ed by the next generation of leading scientists.