Nuclear chemist speaks to VSU students

Sep. 26—VALDOSTA — Clarice Phelps, nuclear chemist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, visited Valdosta State University biology and chemistry students.

Phelps was part of the ORNL team that collaborated with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research to discover the element Tennessine. According to ORNL, Tennessine is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Ts and atomic number 117. It is the second-heaviest known element and the penultimate element of the seventh period of the periodic table.

Phelps said she was a part of the team which confirmed Tennessine as a new chemical element.

"I really love my job," she said. "Since I was a little girl I always knew I would be a part of something big and being a part of the discovery of Tennessine was very transformative for me."

Phelps graduated from Tennessee State University in 2003 with a chemistry degree, after struggling academically she joined the United States Navy. She enrolled in the Navy's Nuclear Power School.

She graduated from the Navy's Nuclear Power School program in the top 10% of her class, which led her to Cole-Parmer, chemical instrument company in Vernon Hills, Ill. After nine months, she returned to Tennessee in 2009 when she began as a technician at ORNL.

"I could have been a different student in undergrad but I don't think that was the path for me. I don't recommend that but I do believe everyone's path is the one they are meant to walk no matter what," Phelps said. "Graduating at the top of my class was something new to me because I did not think that I was that kind of student. I learned how to study in the program and learned how to make material make sense to me."

Phelps shared her research on the processing of radioactive transuranic elements at ORNL with students. She also shared the importance of internship and corporate career opportunities, while sharing the difference in personal protective equipment and technology of monitoring nuclear versus radioactive experiments.

In 2015, she received her master's in mechanical engineering with a nuclear and radiation engineering focus at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas and is pursuing her Ph.D. in radioactive chemistry at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tenn. "I am really passionate about outreach because when you learn about people and the opportunities that are out there you can get students interested in a potential career path," she said. "I think youth need to see someone who looks like them because there is an under-represented minority in science, so exposing them to it at a young age it will create a curiosity."