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Nuclear Science Division

Berkeley Lab’s Engineering and Nuclear Science Divisions host ‘High School STEM Day’ activities on March 20

On March 20th, over 60 students and teachers from Bay Area high schools visited the Lab for High School STEM Day, a monthly program hosted by Berkeley Lab’s K-12 STEM Education and Outreach Program in collaboration with the Women’s Support and Empowerment Council (WSEC). The program featured talks about science, technology, and engineering efforts Lab-wide, and included tours of the Engineering Division’s Fabrication and Composites Shops and the 88-Inch Cyclotron (part of the Nuclear Science Division), as well as the Advanced Light Source (ALS), the Integrative Genomics Building (IGB), and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC).

In Memorium – Doug Greiner

Doug 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.  

Collaboration Fuels High-Speed, Data-Intensive Research to Understand How Nuclei Decay

A technical evaluation using data from a recent scientific-user experiment demonstrated how ESnet enables researchers at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) – led by Heather Crawford, a staff scientist in the Nuclear Science Division – to send large amounts of data across the country, analyze it in near real-time, and return results, enabling quicker data-informed experimental choices.

Fragments

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!

Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accountability Moments

Psychological Safety

At the Nuclear Science Division staff meeting on Tuesday, January 23, Janie Pinterits and Kelly Perce from the lab’s IDEA Office gave a presentation about psychological safety. Psychological safety is defined by Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School as “the shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking” and is something we would like to foster in NSD. We believe that the best science is done when all members feel encouraged to openly share ideas and bring up difficult topics without fear of embarrassment or rejection so we can grow and learn from our mistakes together.

They led the attendees through an exercise where they broke us into small groups to discuss two scenarios. Both involved situations where a less experienced person’s attempts to contribute were dismissed by a more senior colleague — a psychologically unsafe situation — and we were tasked with brainstorming how to respond or intervene in a way that enhanced psychological safety for the junior colleague. We then rejoined as a group and shared our thoughts.

As Janie and Kelly shared in their slides, the goal of increasing psychological safety requires us all to maintain an environment of civility and respect, to actively listen to one another, to express and be inclusive of each other’s work preferences, and to give and accept feedback well. We also have to accept that we will have to continually work on this goal without expecting to reach a “steady state.”

Figure 1: An illustration that Janie and Kelly shared of how psychological safety and danger exist as self-reinforcing feedback cycles.

Here is a list of resources that Janie and Kelly shared with us for further learning:

We hope to continue this conversation in the coming weeks and months as we explore this approach to making our workplace more inclusive. Thank you all for your efforts and engagement.