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Nuclear Science Division

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Xin-Nian Wang, a Senior Scientist in NSD’s Theory program has been awarded a prestigious 2024 Humboldt Research Award in recognition of his academic record.  Xin-Nian plans to use this award to continue collaborative research with physicists at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main and other institutes in Germany.  Further details can be found here.

Xin-Nian Wang, a Senior Scientist Retiree Affiliate in NSD’s Theory program

NSD Faculty Scientist Gabriel Orebi Gann was awarded the 2024 Instrumentation Early Career Award from the International Committee for Future Accelerators (ICFA). Gabriel was presented with this award at the 2024 Pisa Meeting on Advanced Detectors in La Biodola, Isola d’Elba.  Further details can be found here.

Gabriel Orebi Gann, NSD Faculty Scientist

Wick Haxton, a Faculty Senior Scientist in NSD’s Theory program was recently elected to the American Philosophical Society. More information can be found here.

Wick Haxton, a Faculty Senior Scientist in NSD’s Theory program

Erich Leistenschneider, a Staff Scientist in the Accelerator-Based Low Energy Research Program was selected as an award recipient for the 2024 Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) Visiting Scholar Program for Experimental Science.  This award acknowledges Erich’s outstanding record and potential impact on the FRIB science program.  Further details can be found here.

Erich Leistenschneider, Staff Scientist in the Accelerator-Based Low Energy Research Program

Several graduate students who performed their research in NSD, or under the guidance of NSD staff, recently graduated with PhDs.  Congratulations to Kalie Knecht (PhD, Nuclear Engineering), Jaewon Lee (PhD, Nuclear Engineering), Kenneth Vetter (PhD, Physics), Max Smiley (PhD Physics), Yang Lyu (PhD, Physics), and Edward Callaghan (PhD Physics).

Yukiya Saito, a former graduate student at the University of British Columbia who was co-supervised by NSD Division Director Reiner Kruecken has been awarded the 2023-2024 DNP PhD Thesis Prize by The Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) of the Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP) for his thesis is entitled Development of Statistical Tools for Studies of the Rapid Neutron Capture Process.

NSD bids farewell to Zuting Lui, Kai Vetter, Xin-Nian Wang, and Don Gunter who all retired from LBNL in June. Thank you Ting, Kai, Xin-Nian, and Don for your many years of outstanding service!

We welcome new hires Corrigan Appleton (Postdoctoral Researcher), Mathis Wiedeking (Staff Scientist), Mark Regis (Electrical Engineering Associate), Rita Sadek (Postdoctoral Researcher), Javier Caravaca (Staff Scientist), David Konyndyk (Sr. Scientific Engineering Associate), Rachel Williams (Administrative Assistant), and Vance Siebert (Sr. Resource Analyst).

Tom Gallant has taken on the position of Division Deputy, Operations for the Nuclear Science Division.  Congratulations on the new role, Tom!

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It is with deep sadness that we note the recent passing of retired NSD scientists Doug Greiner and Joe Cerny.

Doug Greiner will be remembered as a pioneer of experimental relativistic heavy-ion collisions, having worked on many key early experiments, including HISS at the Bevalac and NA-36 at CERN, before retiring in 1993.  He had a particular interest in strangeness production in these collisions, having made early measurements of lambda production in sulfur-sulfur and sulfur-silver collisions. After retirement, Doug returned to the lab part-time, where he helped out with the construction of the STAR time projection chamber.  Our thoughts are with his family, including his son Leo Greiner, who recently retired from the RNC  program, and daughter-in-law Eleanor Judd, who works at Space Sciences Laboratory on the STAR detector trigger.

Joe Cerny will be remembered for his more than half a century of research and leadership at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley.  Before retiring in 2013 he was the former Division Director of the Nuclear Science Division and Associate Laboratory Director at Berkeley Lab, as well as Professor of Chemistry and former Chemistry Department chair, Graduate Division Dean, and Provost and Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Berkeley.  He will be remembered for many notable achievements, including the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Memorial Award of the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor of the U.S. Department of Energy) in 1974, for his “discovery of proton emission as a mode of radioactive decay, for investigation of the limits of nuclear stability of a number of light elements” – and, significantly – “for ingenious instruments that made these discoveries possible.”

Several NSD staff members and affiliates attended the April Meeting of the American Physical Society which was held in Sacramento during the first week of April where they delivered presentations on a range of topics.

NSD’s Alan Poon, the head of the Neutrinos Program, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Alan has been recognized for his “important contributions towards the understanding of neutrino properties in search of physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.”  Further details can be found here.  Congratulations to Alan on this well-deserved award!

NSD celebrates several recent promotions.  Heather Crawford was promoted to Senior Scientist, and Lee Bernstein was promoted to Faculty Senior Scientist.  After open searches, Weronika Wolszczak was promoted to Research Scientist, and Emil Rofors was promoted to Career Track Research Scientist.

Congratulations also go to Carol Chien who celebrates 10 years of service at LBNL!

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In November, NSD held a two-day offsite retreat which brought together the whole division to discuss the goals of the scientific programs and the division’s people stewardship efforts. The agenda included presentations on scientific activities and goals and interactive discussion sessions on topics including career development and the way we work.

In October, NSD hosted the 11th annual Nuclear Science Day for Scouts. The event provides an opportunity for scouts to earn an event badge and learn about nuclear science through a series of hands-on activities. In the image on the right, NSD Postdoctoral Researcher Emil Rofors describes various radiation detectors on display at the “Detector Expo” station.  A description of this year’s event can be found in this article.

Several NSD staff members and affiliates attended the Fall Meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics which was held in Hawaii in late November. Presentations delivered by NSD included topics such as the path to element 120 (Larry Phair), reinforcement learning for ion source control and optimization (Yue Shi Lai), and water coordination chemistry of Nobelium and Lawrencium (Mallory McCarthy).

Staff and students from the Applied Nuclear Physics (ANP) program attended the IEEE Nuclear Science Symposium and Medical Imaging Conference in Vancouver in November.  The meeting is the largest annual radiation instrumentation conference.  Members of ANP and affiliated graduate students delivered a total of 14 presentations, and served as session chairs and topic conveners.

At the conference, ANP Postdoctoral Researcher Lei Pan was recognized with an award for the best paper published in IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science in 2023 for his article entitled Performance of Perovskite CsPbBr3 Single Crystal Detector for Gamma-Ray Detection.

Andre Walker Loud, a Staff Scientist in the Nuclear Theory Program was recently elected a 2023 APS Fellow. He was recognized for his “definitive contributions to fundamental symmetries in nucleons and nuclei, utilizing lattice QCD and Effective Field Theory, including the high-precision computation of the nucleon axial coupling.” Congratulations, Andre!

NSD Staff Scientist Brian Quiter and Faculty Scientist Lee Bernstein received 2023 Berkeley Lab Director’s Awards.  Lee received a Tech Transfer award for supporting the “commercialization of his invention, a production method for a groundbreaking but rare cancer drug called AC-225”, and Brian is a member of the  Mentoring@LBNL team, which won the IDEA Award for Mentorship “for building the critical foundations of a complex mentoring ecosystem that fulfills different employee needs around mentorship while also modeling the value of team science and cross-Lab collaboration over a 3 year period.” Congratulations Brian and Lee! 

Larry Phair, Head of NSD’s 88” Cyclotron Program recently reached 30 years of service. Congratulations to Larry on this major milestone! 

NSD welcomes new hires Marilena Lykiardopoulou (Postdoctoral Researcher), Antoine Armatol (Postdoctoral Researcher), and Tobin Dean Kramazs (Mechanical Engineering Associate).

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NSD has received two DOE NP funding awards for two-year projects focussed on artificial intelligence and machine learning. Heather Crawford of the Low Energy Nuclear Physics program will continue to lead a project developing new methods to optimize the performance of the GRETA spectrometer and the VENUS ion source, while Peter Jacobs from the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program will lead a multi-disciplinary project to develop and deploy novel methods for Bayesian inference and uncertainty quantification.  Further details can be found here.

NSD will also collaborate on a newly awarded DOE Nuclear Data project to develop the Berkeley Atlas: a database of absolute cross sections for inelastic, gamma-ray production with 14 MeV neutrons.  The project will be led by Johns Hopkins University.  The LBNL contribution will be led by Arun Persuad from the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division (ATAP) with Lee Bernstein serving as the NSD lead.

Over the summer, several DOE Highlights featured NSD research, from the final results of the MAJORANA Demonstrator experiment, Lattice QCD results on neutrino-nucleon interaction, and the first observations of the flow patterns of hypernuclei in heavy ion collisions by the STAR collaboration. 

In August, NSD Faculty Senior Scientist Barbara Jacak hosted a meeting of the California Electron-Ion Collider consortium.  The meeting, which was held on the campus of UC Berkeley, brought together more than fifty physicists from five universities and three national laboratories to coordinate research on physics, calorimetry, and tracking in California.

Also in August, Brian Quiter from NSD’s Applied Nuclear Physics program hosted a workshop on Radiological Data Fusion.  The workshop was organized in coordination with DOE NNSA Office of Defence Nonproliferation Research and Development (NA-22) and discussed recent advances and future needs associated with the fusion of radiological and contextual data for nuclear nonproliferation.  The workshop was attended by more than forty participants from national laboratories and government agencies.

NSD researcher Bjoern Lehnert has been awarded the 2022 Outstanding Mentor Award by the Berkeley Lab Workforce Development and Education program.  Bjoern, who is a Project Scientist in the Neutrinos program, received the award for his mentorship of a student from a minority serving institution through the NSD-led GREAT-NS initiative.  Bjoern will formally receive his award at a ceremony on October 3rd.

Zhenyu Ye (pictured left) has joined NSD as a Divisional Fellow in the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program.  Zhenyu joins LBNL from The University of Illinois, Chicago and brings a wealth of experience in the development of novel particle tracking detectors.

Shujie Li of the Relativistic Nuclear Collisions program was promoted from Postdoctoral Researcher to Research Scientist.

NSD also welcomes new hires Karthika Balan (Sr. Scientific Engineering Associate), Yuxun Guo (Postdoctoral Researcher), and Thomas MacDonald (Sr. Scientific Engineering Associate).  We also welcome Julia Dreyling and Snehadri Das who are interns with the GREAT-NS and SULI programs, respectively.

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Norman K. Glendenning sadly passed away on September 5th 2022 at the age of 91, after a long illness. He was a distinguished nuclear theorist and a founding member of the Nuclear Theory Group in the NSD.  An obituary written by James Symons, Xin-Nian Wang, and Fridolin Weber was recently published by Physics Today and can be found here.

Pioneering NSD scientist Darleane C. Hoffman received the 2023 Enrico Fermi Presidential Award, one of the most prestigious science honors bestowed by the U.S. government, in a special ceremony at Berkeley Lab on Tuesday, June 6th. Hoffman, a nuclear chemist, was honored for her scientific discoveries that advanced the field of nuclear and radiochemistry, for distinguished service to the DOE’s missions in national security and nuclear waste management, and for her sustained leadership in radiochemistry research and education.  More details of Darlene’s award, and a video of the ceremony can be found here.

NSD postdoctoral researcher Emil Rofors represented Berkeley Lab at the 2023 National Postdoc Association Annual Conference in Philadelphia.  Emil is a postdoctoral researcher in the Applied Nuclear Physics program and a member of the LBNL Postdoc Association board.

NSD established a Twitter account (@LBNLNuclearSci) which is being used to share regular highlights from across the Division and the Laboratory.

NSD welcomes new hires Erich Leistenschneider (Staff Scientist), Ashish Pandav (Postdoctoral Researcher), and Lisa Schlüter (Postdoctoral Researcher).

We are also pleased to host summer interns from a range of programs including the SULI program, SURF, the  NNSA Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program, the NSD-led GREAT-NS initiative, and through the N3AS Physics Frontier Center.  We welcome Phoebe Andromeda, Julia Dreiling, Brandon Wilson, Israel Galeana, Patrick Francisco, Elijah Dolz, Laylah Chacon, Griffin Rhoads, Samantha Goldberg, Hong Joo Ryoo, Tiana French, Yajat Thanawala, Birgitta Biendarra, Declan Hoban, Bryce Benun, Wan Siyang, Siddhant Mal, Annabelle McCutcheon, Charles- Yu Hong Chan, Jasmine Crawford, Henry Purcell, Malika Golshian, Brandon Lem, Paul Shin, Ashley Rincon, Dylon Fleming, Eddy Alderete, Emma Lynch, Ethan Skeens, Hong Joo Ryoo, Joseph Koplowitz, Sawyer Kaplan, Diego Hernandez Kent.

We also welcome visiting faculty Prof. Wing To who will be working with Gabriel Orebi-Gann.

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In February, the final results from the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR were published in Physical Review Letters.  The results set a limit on the half-life of the neutrinoless double beta decay of Ge-76.

NSD Senior Scientist Volker Koch has been named as an Outstanding Referee by the Physical Review journals, as chosen by the journal editors for 2023.  Instituted in 2008, the Outstanding Referee program recognizes the number, quality, and timeliness of referee reports and honors a small fraction of the journal’s 82,000 referees each year.

NSD Postdoctoral Researcher Weronika Wolszczak has been selected as the co-chair of the Berkeley postdoc association.

NSD welcomes new hires Adan Esparza (Research Associate), Lei Pan (Postdoctoral Researcher), Kushant Patel (Senior Scientific Research Associate), Celine Li (Senior Scientific Engineering Associate), Michael Gorin (Administrative Assistant), Ryan Heller (Research Scientist), and Dayle Silverio (Administrative Assistant).

Several NSD employees were recently promoted.  Mark Bandstra, Alexey Drobizhev, Yue Shi Lai, Marco Salathe, and Jayson Vavrek were all promoted to Research Scientist.  

Service awards

  • Mateusz Ploskon has reached the milestone of 15 years of service.
  • Shamsu Basunia has reached the milestone of 20 years of service.
  • Alan Poon has reached the milestone of 25 years of service.
  • Xin-Nian Wang has reached the milestone of 30 years of service.

Congratulations to all of you for your achievements!