Sending clear signals: Cooke bridges academia, industry in ORNL-Tennessee Tech collaboration

Years before becoming a researcher at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Corey Cooke hit a discouraging setback in his pursuit of an advanced degree. A misunderstanding about his research funding led him to leave his doctoral studies after a year. He later switched colleges to resume the effort through Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville, which helped him finish while he worked full time in Washington, D.C.

Working through this challenge helped prepare Cooke for his current role helping young researchers navigate their graduate studies as he coordinates a partnership between ORNL and Tennessee Technological University’s electrical and computer engineering program. 

As a joint faculty member, Cooke teaches online courses and advises students pursuing graduate degrees, which creates a pipeline bringing newly minted researchers to the lab while helping enhance the expertise of current staff. It’s one of the many ways that Cooke, who recently began leading the Radio Frequency and Intelligent Systems group in the Energy Science and Technology Directorate, promotes growth and collaboration.

The Tennessee Tech program is ideal for the lab’s non-traditional students. “ORNL researchers represent a demographic that is hard to serve in higher education while they are working,” said Cooke, whose own research encompasses wireless and radar communication systems. “We have people here already doing work above their educational level – researchers with bachelor’s degrees doing Ph.D.-level work. We want to help those people bring their credentials in line with their skills, while expanding their professional opportunities.” 

Cooke steers ORNL employees through the lab’s tuition assistance process and helps them choose study topics that springboard from their lab research, as he did when pursuing his doctorate while working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. 

The lab as classroom

A Tennessee native, Cooke encourages top students from Tennessee Tech to explore opportunities with ONRL. One of those students, Tyler McCormick, took a class with Cooke while pursuing a master’s degree. “I would never have come to the lab if it wasn’t for him,” said McCormick, who previously thought ORNL conducted only nuclear research and only hired scientists with doctorates. After two years as a researcher in ORNL’s National Security Sciences Directorate, or NSSD, McCormick plans to continue into the Tennessee Tech doctoral program in the fall. 

Cooke arrived at ORNL in a similar way, after interning at the lab under the past Tennessee Tech program liaison, former ORNL researcher Adam Anderson. After Anderson moved on and Cooke was hired as a researcher in NSSD, Cooke wanted the cohort to continue so others could receive the same benefits.

“I would never have come to ORNL if Adam hadn’t brought me here that summer, because I had no idea that ORNL did wireless research,” Cooke said. Experts at leading regional universities don’t seem to know either – a situation Cooke aims to change partly through publications by ORNL’s Tennessee Tech students. 

“I can help staff carve out an unclassified aspect of their results for use toward their degree,” Cooke said. “They can try out aspirational ideas and be published, which also gives the lab visibility and attracts national security research projects so we can go deeper in that area.”

Hollis Neel, a research associate in NSSD’s Resilient Communications group, was a prime candidate for the Tennessee Tech cohort. While earning a bachelor’s degree in math and a master’s in geography, Neel helped found the Small Satellite Laboratory at the University of Georgia. After contributing technology to two satellites, Neel took an ORNL job in geospatial science. “Hollis came here with so much practical experience,” Cooke said. “How many people have put something in space?”

But to support his new role, Neel saw a need to shore up his foundational knowledge in engineering and data science. In 2021, Cooke encouraged him to pursue a doctorate with Tennessee Tech. 

For Neel, having an advisor who works at ORNL makes it easier to balance work and study. “When I have a sponsor-mandated obligation that would interfere with a class or a deadline, I have the flexibility of being able to work around those job obligations,” he said. 

Neel praised Cooke’s style of teaching classes including communications theory, random signals and systems, wireless communications and signal analysis. “He’s exceptionally bright yet has zero issue admitting when he doesn’t know something and will go straight to the white board and derive it,” Neel said. “That willingness to return to first principles was really fun and enticing and not something that is shared across the field.”

Neel found himself learning skills that were immediately useful at work. “Every single class, there was zero doubt as to how it was directly applicable to the communications field,” he said. 

Protecting the grid, improving wireless systems

In electrical engineering, Tennessee Tech’s strengths align with Cooke’s expertise at the intersection of machine learning and communications theory. His research focuses on radar, digital signal processing, communications systems and the collection and detection of very weak signals. 

“It’s like a puzzle,” he said. “If you find the right mathematical model, you can pull the signal out of the noise or glean information from that signal. In recent years, machine learning and AI have become tools when the problem is too complicated, or when there are too many unknown variables, to use a math equation.” 

Cooke’s scientific investigations connect modeling and computational approaches with practical problems in hardware. For example, one aspect of supply chain security in the bulk power grid is ensuring that malicious implants are not present in control equipment sourced from foreign manufacturers. 

“How do you know there is not a cyber vulnerability being introduced to the grid through the hardware?” Cooke said. “There are small ways that tampering with electronics could harm the operation of the larger system, like interfering with a turbine’s rate of spin in a power plant.” Cooke has investigated non-invasive scanning methods that don’t damage electronics or interrupt their use. 

Cooke would like his group to explore new research directions. For example, tackling challenges in wireless manufacturing technology could increase safety in factories by eliminating power cords, while enabling automation options such as mobile robots. But wireless sensors in factory equipment may not function reliably indoors, or they may share overlapping radio frequencies that interfere with each other.  

Cooke envisions using artificial intelligence and high-performance computing to improve wireless communication networks. These systems could be custom designed for specific factories or to eliminate wireless dead spots in a particular city. He also sees a need for more robust wireless systems supporting safety-of-life applications, such as autonomous driving. 

A culture of collaboration

Having worked with staff from several scientific specialties across the lab, Cooke continues to build connections among researchers who use the same skill set to tackle different problems. He helped found the lab-wide Radio Frequency Research Forum, which hosts a speaker at each monthly meeting of ORNL researchers who study radio frequency systems or applied signal processing. “We’re trying to bring everybody together so we still collaborate, even if we don’t work together every day,” Cooke said.

Cooke helps grow the lab’s capabilities by growing the capabilities of individuals and then creating opportunities for them to combine forces. This is one of Neel’s favorite aspects of the ORNL-Tennessee Tech program.

“It’s been really fun having a group of people that are in the same Ph.D. cohort and being able to kick around ideas, thinking through our research and discussing what we are learning,” Neel said. “It’s a great interaction from the perspective of working with another kind of research group. I’ve been excited that the cohort has been growing.” 

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.