UC President Mark Yudof has named an 11-member committee of university regents, faculty and researchers to advise him in the search for the next director of Berkeley Lab. Eva Nogales, a biophysicist with the Life Sciences Division, is a member of the search committee. The committee's first meeting will be at the Lab on August 19 during which committee members will solicit comments from Lab staff. The time and location of the comment period will be announced in Today at Berkeley Lab when confirmed. The goal is to present a candidate for approval to the UC Board of Regents before December 2009. More>
As computational scientists are confronted with increasingly massive datasets, one of the biggest challenges is having the right tools to gain insight from the data. Recently a team of DOE researchers found that VisIt may be up to the challenge. They ran VisIt using 8,000 to 32,000 processing cores to tackle datasets ranging from 500 billion to 2 trillion zones. The project was a collaboration among leading visualization researchers from Berkeley Lab, Livermore Lab and Oak Ridge Lab. More>
In The News: Berkeley Lab Builds a Desktop Particle Accelerator[Popular Science] Giant particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have become the poster children for big science. These gargantuan structures hurl particles at velocities close to the speed of light, in the hopes of uncovering the most basic constituents of matter and energy. But when Wim Leemans gets his way, particle accelerators will be just another piece of lab equipment, no more obtrusive than a gene sequencer or a desktop printer. Leemans heads up the BELLA program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where researchers have figured out how to accelerate particles over inches, not miles. Now, armed with new funding, the BELLA team looks to pack even more punch into a small space. More>
EH&S: DOE Approves Lab's Environmental Management System DOE recently determined that Berkeley Lab has a fully implemented Environmental Management System (EMS). The requirements are extensive, yet DOE expects the Lab to take a common-sense approach to being aware of how activities impact the environment and how to reduce these impacts in cost-effective ways. Berkeley Lab's EMS has thus far emphasized environmental, energy, and transportation projects such as reducing fleet fuel use (down 35% from 1999 levels) and emitting less diesel particulate matter (down 53% below 2005 levels for stationary sources, 25% for mobile sources), as well as purchasing "green" products. More>
Employee Activity: Lab Photo Club Reforms; Meeting on July 8The Lab’s Photo Club will start meeting again and the next gathering is scheduled for Wednesday, July 8, from noon to 1 p.m. in Building 90-3075. The group will meet once a month to take, critique, and display photos. Roy Kaltschmidt, the Lab’s official photographer, will meet with the group to provide instruction and advice. Those interested in photography are invited to bring their lunches to the gathering. Contact club president Lorraine Dowling (x4435) or Misty Tagatac (x7074) for more information.
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