Early Career Achievements: Q&A With Karly Harrod

You’ve been at ORNL for a little over a year and have already received an Early Career Competition LDRD award for the National Security Sciences Directorate for FY24. Congrats! Tell me a little bit about the significance of this award for you and how it impacts your research efforts.

“Thank you! Yes, I have been at ORNL for a little over a year now and was awarded the FY24 Early Career Competition LDRD award about 7 months after starting my position, which was quite an honor. The award has allowed me to quickly enter the realm of PI’ing my own project, which has been a fantastic learning opportunity, especially in my first year at the lab just out of grad school. I have rather quickly been able to be a part of many things that I did not think I would have on my radar for my first year at the lab from the process of writing a research proposal, creating and managing a budget, managing a research team and executing the research work. It has been very fun to learn these skills and the internal tools used within the lab to perform these tasks. It has given me a “behind the hood” viewpoint into the other projects that I work on by allowing me the perspective of understanding the amount of work that goes into setting up new projects. This has been rather eye-opening coming out of grad school where I didn’t have to worry about any other avenues of projects beyond completing research.”

Your academic background is focused on mathematics, but many of your research pursuits include applications in climate and disease outbreaks. How did you get into applying computational and mathematical science to these more humanitarian subject areas?

“I grew up playing math puzzles and games with my father, which fostered a love of mathematics from a young age. My mother was a nurse, and I considered going into the medical world, but my love of mathematics ultimately pulled me towards becoming the non-medical type of doctor. In undergrad, I double majored in mathematics and statistics, and when choosing a “track,” I decided to choose the applied track over the pure track for both majors as I was more interested in the applied problem sets – many of which happened to be in the humanitarian or bio-medical realm. “

“I had an amazing opportunity for my senior research project where I worked on a humanitarian project for the UNHCR, determining driving factors behind why unaccompanied minors fled their home countries towards the U.S. border. Working on this project filled me with so much passion and I loved the direct human component and impact of the work.”

“This passion for human-centric projects continued through graduate school where I chose the University of Notre Dame due to the applied nature of the work done within the department and perfect combination of my undergraduate experience which was reflected in the name, Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics Department. During my time at Notre Dame, I continued to seek out and build a broad research profile spanning the areas of cardiovascular modeling, clinical trials on rare and neglected diseases, infectious disease modeling, global health challenges, phylogenetic inference and surgical techniques for breast cancer.” 

“Now at ORNL, I am getting to apply my previous experience in the realm of global health and disease modeling to an area that’s new to me – climate data. I’m enjoying the challenging of learning a new domain and the intricacies that come with working with satellite data.”

What are you currently working on that excites you?

“Currently, one of the projects that I’m working on focuses on the automatic extraction of data of interest from bodies of text. Specifically, I’m working on extracting disease occurrence data from a corpus of disease reports. I am particularly excited about this work, as data availability is a challenging area in the disease modeling world. Training models requires large amounts of historical data, which can be difficult to obtain – especially given that each country chooses to report on and document the diseases within their borders in different methods.”

You’ve had experience at a few national laboratories now. What, in your opinion, makes ORNL unique among them?

“Yes! I spent two summers at Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory as a Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship, or SULI, intern as well as a summer at Pacific Northwest National Lab as a doctorate intern. I loved both labs and had a wonderful experience at both places. To me, one of the things that makes ORNL stand out is the location. I enjoy the affordability of the Knoxville-greater area in combination with the proximity to the Smoky Mountains.”

What do you do when you’re not solving big problems at the lab? 

“When I’m not at work, I enjoy swimming in the quarries, gardening and music. I also enjoy historical home research. My husband and I bought a historic home in Old Mechanicsville, and it has been surprisingly fun and personally unexpected to discover a new passion for historical research. I’m currently working (albeit slowly) through dating all of the homes in our neighborhood, which surprisingly some are quite a bit older than was previously thought.”

Are you listening to or reading anything interesting (work-related or otherwise)?

“I’m currently reading through Handbell Compendium by Michael Jedamzik. It’s an impressively thorough book on handbells including the science/physics behind them, maintenance, ensemble types and notation. By happenstance, I joined a handbell choir in undergrad at the University of St. Thomas and have enjoyed playing since then. I especially enjoyed my time playing with the high-leveled choir at the University of Notre Dame where we toured internationally and played highly technically challenging music. I now play bells with a small local group and enjoy continuing even if not quite at the same level the previous choirs played at. I do hope that one day the local Knoxville handbell community will create a professional-level group in the future!”