by Jenn Tang
Once a quarter since the fall of 2023, the Berkeley Lab Community Relations Office has teamed up with the Early Career Employee Resource Group’s Outreach Committee to pop up at the downtown Berkeley Farmers’ Market. These tabling events provide a great opportunity for Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers to engage in informal conversations with the Berkeley public, share insights and anecdotes about the many ways our research positively impacts society, and increase awareness about Berkeley Lab in the community.
Past farmers’ market topics have included carbon capture and storage, energy-efficient buildings, biofuels and bioproducts, supercomputing, and cosmology/astrophysics. Last Saturday, researchers, operations, and communications staff from the Advanced Light Source (ALS) had a chance to highlight the science that happens underneath the iconic dome on the hill.
Equipped with a 3D printed model of the ALS booster and storage rings and a paper version visitors could take home to build themselves, ALS team members Tanny Chavez Esparza, Cindy Lee, Bernhard Luttgenau, Wiebke Koepp, and Santiago Rodriguez Villalobos engaged with dozens of visitors throughout the day, sharing stories about how the ALS is used to build better batteries, advance next-generation computer chips, and help develop novel cancer therapies.
One visitor to the Berkeley Lab booth noted that they’d seen the big dome on the hill for years but never knew what it was. “It’s really cool to learn about the Advanced Light Source and talk with scientists about all the exciting science happening underneath the dome!”
