The Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Awards are competitive research grants that provide seed money for junior faculty members. Since the program’s inception, ORAU has awarded 910 grants totaling more than $4.55 million. Including the matching funds from member institutions, ORAU has facilitated grants worth more than $9 million to junior faculty at its member universities.
ORAU’s $25,000 annual Extreme Classroom Makeover is back for the 2025 school year! The grand prize will be awarded to one East Tennessee teacher for updating his or her classroom with the latest technology. Through this program, ORAU has given away more than $500,000 to local schools since 2009. In all, ORAU has impacted more than 30 East Tennessee schools and thousands of students.
Ali Alqaraghuli, Ph.D., was just about to start his NASA Postdoctoral Fellowship when he was interviewed by Further Together host Michael Holtz. Alqaraghuli's research focuses on the ASTHROS balloon-born telescope. The focus of ASTHROS is to place the telescope over the Antarctic to gather and better understand how stars form. Alqaraghuli is developing a portable test bed to help calibrate the antenna and the telescope. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles, scientists have all the facilities they need to test and track and adjust things if needed. "Once we ship everything to Antarctica, we're kind of a bit limited on what equipment is available, and things of that nature. So my main project really is to develop like a portable test bed that we can take with us to Antarctica that basically can do just as good of a job as if we were to have all these big fancy machines in the JPL Center," he says.
