ALS-United is an opportunity to meet the people collaborating at the Advanced Light Source and the ALS Upgrade Project. Hear firsthand how team science enables the cutting-edge research of today and builds the facility of the future. This month, we spoke with Don MacGill (ALS Mechanical Technician Supervisor), Matt Warren (ALS Mechanical Technician Supervisor), and Kyle McCombs (ALS Mechanical Technology Group Lead).
View the text Q&A after the video:
What does your work entail?
MacGill: I’m one of the ALS Mechanical Technician Supervisors for the new ALS Mech Tech group. I’ve been here since the early 90s, when the ALS was getting built. My job involves taking in work, distributing the work, and then doing job walks with customers, find out what they need, but also where the hazards are, doing job walks with the technicians, make sure they understand everything, and making sure that they they don’t notice anything that might be a hazard, also getting their input on the job. At the ALS, we have lots of procedures and authorized persons lists, so I make sure that all my direct reports have their proper training. I also partner with Matt and Kyle, looking at the future, planning what we need for hiring. Our work involves supporting anything mechanical at the ALS, as well as supporting ALS-U.
Warren: I’m also a Mechanical Technician Supervisor at the ALS and I’ve been at the Lab for just over a year now. My job is very similar to what Don said. I’m primarily focused on crane and rigging, equipment installation. I also oversee the Building 80 Machine Shop, where we not just make parts for the ALS Upgrade Project, but also a lot of the beamline users, making all sorts of different parts for them.
McCombs: ALS Mechanical Technology Group Lead. This is my 16th year. I manage a lot of the work in Building 77. We also work in Buildings 46, 53, 71 high bay, 6W and 7W, and at the ALS in 80, 6, and 15. We occasionally work at the off-site location in Richmond on Atlas Road, and soon we will get the keys to use the high bay space of Building 92 to do some QA inspection acceptance.
What career paths led you here?
MacGill: I was hired when they were just building the ALS. I got to work on the storage ring…that got me interested in the mech tech field. I went to school, came back, and worked on the B factory project. After that, I moved back to the ALS supporting operations with the mech tech team, building beamlines, and working on optics assemblies. As opportunities came, I moved up into supervising.
Warren: My background’s in mechanical engineering, and after school, I started at a steel mill and worked in both operations and maintenance there. I also worked at a couple chemical plants nearby, and with the changing manufacturing environment around here, Berkeley Lab was appealing. I still get to do a lot of the same type of stuff, but what is really cool is seeing that what we’re working on can apply to the research and products that the general public uses.
McCombs: I started at the ALS 16 years ago, working with a mentor of mine who is enjoying retirement but still actually consulting with ALS: John Pepper. I was lucky enough to get into a really small niche where I got to see the world of mechanical design, fabrication, assembly, and installation on the beamlines. After school, I went to work for the Engineering division, did mechanical design, and worked with some vendors, contractors, and our own staff to build undulators for SLAC. I feel fortunate that I just kind of flowed naturally to a leadership role. I know the people, I know our customers, I know the ALS.
How do you all work together?
McCombs: We meet every morning—Don, Matt, myself, and our work leads—to go over all the hottest jobs that are happening. Sometimes they’re planned, sometimes they’re surprises. I also help with merging our ALS and ALS-U teams, trying to find opportunities for the team to mingle, mentor each other, and cross-train so that we’re ready for this massive amount of work coming our way.
One good example of our teamwork is here in one of our clean spaces in Building 77, where we are working on two new monochromators. This is a monochromator vacuum chamber. They’re each unique in their own ways, but have very similar features to them. One thing that’s always common is vacuum science and the methods we use to guarantee a good vacuum pressure.
Vacuum is important for many reasons. Number one, contamination control. Number two, it helps get nice clean data for the scientists. A lot of this equipment wouldn’t work unless it was under vacuum. There’s also some water cooling. There’s also mechanical adjusters that make these gizmos inside here move and take the data that these scientists need.
And we come down to the installation, with rigging and equipment that we use to actually get this installed in the beamline. So, I think it’s a pretty good example actually of how we always help each other and always look for room for improvement with either methods that we choose to use or the equipment.
Warren: For me, the crane, rigging, and installing big stuff is pretty familiar, but I’m used to working on large pumps. Learning about vacuum pumps at the ALS is a whole new world to me. So, I’ve really really enjoyed learning about that. And I would say the things that I’ve learned now that we’re all together it’s just more about ALS-U.
MacGill: I know that we’re going to be very involved with ALS-U, so the more Kyle teaches us, the more he exposes us to, the better. And we are now using Jira, which is a job tracking program that we go through everyday and we all have visibility of.
Warren: Now that we have the two groups together, we have a big pool of resources, so there’s a good chance someone on our team has done this before or something like it. I try to lean on whoever I can to help us figure something out.
McCombs: One thing that’s really beneficial for our team is that on a project as big as ALS-U, and an operation as big as ALS, there’s way too many meetings for one of us to go to all of them. So, we each represent our team at these meetings, bring information back, and make sure that we can manage our team’s resources to the best of our ability.
What are some recent accomplishments you’re proud of?
McCombs: One good thing about being so busy is that you hit a lot of milestones. The accumulator ring installation is 85% complete as of the end of the Winter 2025 shutdown. We will finish the remaining 15% this upcoming summer, so it’s going to be awesome to have the entire accumulator ring installed.
We made it one full lap around the tunnel with electrical wire ways for cables and plumbing that will help energize the accumulator ring. We installed two new shielding brick walls. To us, lead and bricks can be exciting; they’ll keep people safe when we turn this accelerator on.
Warren: One thing I want to bring up is the number of roof block moves. It was a lot! And, double stacking the roof blocks. That was a first, and we did it without incident. We were actually ahead of schedule at the end!. Didn’t think we were going to be but we finished up with a little time to spare.
MacGill: I’m proud of how our two groups came together. The shielding area job that Kyle mentioned was coming down to the wire and had a lot of technical challenges. A few different groups of techs came together, and I saw nothing but good interactions there. That was also true with some of the AR vacuum installations that we had.
What’s on the horizon for your team?
McCombs: At the end of the summer shutdown, we will be done mechanically with the accumulator ring. We would like to be really aggressive, and within one year from the end of the summer, do everything it takes: running cables, installing power supply racks, water cooling hoses, any utility that we need to energize these racks, and get them all talking to every magnet and vacuum pump in the tunnel.
We have a plan to then commission the accumulator ring during user operations with minimal impacts, if any, to the existing ALS.
Thank you to the ALS community for your patience with us getting in there, making a lot of noise, and getting in people’s way at times. But we promise it’ll be worth it.
What do you like to do in your free time?
MacGill: What I enjoy doing the most is spending time with my kids, whether it’s playing, taking them to parks, taking them camping. Eventually, I hope to get them into the other stuff I used to do before I had kids, which was working on my old Buick and going backpacking, but that comes later when they get a little bit older.
Warren: I have two kids as well, and much like Don said, most of my time is spent doing stuff with them. Going to parks, going camping, fishing, trying to teach my kids to fish. The little time I do get for myself, I still camp, fish, go hunting, pretty much anything outdoors.
McCombs: I would say the same—spend time with my wife and kids as much as I can. I’m coaching for my son’s baseball team, and right now we’re hoping to make the playoffs. In my free time, I’ve been mountain biking a lot lately and trying to get somewhat decent at golf. We’re lucky that Tilden Park is right next door. It’s a pretty difficult course, and humbling, but it’s still really fun!