NCI and FNL Researchers Turn Lessons Learned into Stepping Stones

The Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Department processes and completes roughly 25,000 work orders every year through our preventative maintenance program, trouble calls, special assists, and repairs. In fact, every task small or large is monitored and tracked through the work order system. Please read on for a better understanding of the life of a work order from generation to closeout.

You may not know it, but NIH provides a variety of family and personal resources, like child, adult, and family care, financial and legal planning, and identity theft assistance to all its employees. These services extend beyond the NIH main campus to employees in all locations, including the NCI at Frederick and Shady Grove.

Maddie Hurwitz is something of a renaissance woman. An undergraduate student at Williams College, she is passionate about science, ensemble music, and equestrian sports. She also spent every summer from 2016–2018 at NCI at Frederick working on projects spanning immunity research, clinical medicine, and genetics.

Here I was, an 18-year-old student intern with a chance to interview a prominent research scientist and suddenly, face-to-face with her, I ran out of questions. Silence filled the room. Now what? My Urbana High School classes had not prepared me to answer that question. Well, they had not prepared me to interview a scientist, either.

“Here are lions.” This fanciful phrase for the unknown embellishes the blank areas of antiquated maps. Sometimes cartographers used the phrase “Terra Incognita” (“unknown land”) instead. Either way, the message was clear: we don’t know what’s beyond this point. The modern study of genetics is similar.