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 Jordan Caddick (Project Director in Projects & Infrastructure Modernization Division) and Calvin Lau (Principal Resource Analyst).
View the text Q&A after the video:
What is involved in your jobs?
Caddick: I lead a team of project managers that support the ALS-U constellation projects as well as manage a subcontract for ALS-U to remove and install the storage ring.
Lau: I’m a principal resource analyst, so I’m an employee with the Office of the Chief Financial Officer matrixed to the ALS and ALS-U. I’m part of the finance team, so we do a lot of financial analysis and budgeting. We do financial reporting, budgeting, forecasting, variance analysis, and other kinds of data analysis. It involves a lot of number crunching, working with Excel, and then explaining the terminology to principal investigators and group leads. This terminology includes encumbrances, cost availability, or purchase orders–although the latter is not strictly a financial term. I help researchers make sure they don’t exceed their budgets.
One of the portfolios I manage is the laboratory-directed research & development (LDRD) projects. Other members of our team also support research projects, making sure that we don’t exceed the budgets provided by the Department of Energy or other sponsors.
What career paths led you here?
Caddick: I started my career in the early 2000s with the US Department of State and spent about 12 years with its Diplomatic Facility and Embassy Design and Construction group overseas. In 2017, I came back to the US, and a natural transition was to the Department of Energy.
I took an engineering role at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and then five years later accepted an opportunity at LBNL, and here I am now. My past job really connects to my role here at LBNL, because it was in engineering and construction roles, which is the focus of our work on the ALS-U project.
We’re upgrading the accelerator on a very large and complex scale. When I was overseas in Asia, Africa, and Europe, working with the US Department of State, there were a lot of challenges, both engineering and geographical. That kind of size and complexity is pretty equal to what we’re doing at the ALS and upgrading the accelerator.
Lau: Two jobs prior to working at the Lab, I used to work as a financial consultant for airports. I really liked that job, but I found that I didn’t really want to stick in aviation. It felt very niche and narrow. Then, I did find a job in a big corporate firm, a large consultancy and accounting firm. I found it challenging, but I didn’t find the day-to-day that meaningful or impactful. So then, I switched over to Berkeley Lab, and it combined what I liked in my first job—it’s been far more mission-oriented and driven.
I’ve worked at the Lab for about five and a half years, and I’ve liked it far more than my last job. Before joining the ALS, I worked in operations, and it was nice to provide guidance to Lab customers. If they needed funding for something, I would run different analyses to see how much it would cost and bring it up to Lab leadership to see what kind of funding was available.
It’s been impactful and meaningful whenever I handle requests from the group leads or budget managers. Being able to quickly provide them with various kinds of analysis and knowing that they take that and run with it to ask for funding, I can see how this will support the ALS and further its mission as a whole.
How do the two of you work as a team?
Lau: Jordan and I work together very closely. I’m part of the finance team, and Jordan is a CAM, a control account manager. The finance team will often send out financial information and reporting over to the CAMs, and we help review the data to ensure accuracy—all the costs and budgets are accounted for. We’ll help out with technical terms like submitting resource adjustments, making sure that items that have hit the projects are correct. If they belong somewhere else, we’ll help move those out to another project ID. We’ll help out with submitting monthly accruals, making sure that any high dollar value transaction is accounted for in that month.
For instance, if we have a service due on June 30, we want to account for that cost in our books, but maybe they won’t submit the invoice until June 28, and that’s past our AP deadline. So, us on the finance team will work with Jordan and other CAMs making sure we have enough documentation to properly account for it and accrue for that cost.
Caddick: I would say, too, that if a project manager is like the pilot of a plane, the data that the resource analyst provides is like all of the flight data. You cannot fly that plane without all that data, so it’s super duper tied together quite closely.
What are some work milestones you’re looking forward to?
Caddick: One of the things that I’m really excited about in this ALS-U journey is getting closer and closer to taking out the old storage ring and putting in the new storage ring. We’ve engaged with a subcontractor and we’ve finalized a removal plan during the first couple months of dark time, which is when we shut the accelerator down. It’s been really neat to actually get down into the details and figure out how we’re going to take this giant accelerator out piece by piece in a safe manner and then clean the floor for the new accelerator. We’ve figured that out, so that’s really neat.
Lau: On my end, I’m excited about some projects I worked on recently. We just went through budget formulation, and this is my first year at the ALS, so it is exciting to learn about the flows and cadences of finance on this side of the house.
We also went through LDRD formulation recently, and it’s the same—it’s exciting to know how the little piece that I do will funnel out in a few months. We did mid-year check-ins with a lot of our group leads. It’s nice to have these check-ins with them and see where they’re tracking in terms of their various spending accounts and helping them progress to make sure that they are in line with the plan.
What do you like to do in your free time?
Lau: I enjoy traveling and try to do an international trip at least once a year. I’m also a runner. I found a lot of friendship and community through different run clubs. I’ve somewhat recently caught the race bug. I’ve run two marathons in the past year, which were very very challenging but very rewarding.
Otherwise, if I’m feeling less active, I’ll spend a lot of quality time with friends and family. I have a five-and-a-half-year-old niece I love spending time with, and being the fun uncle, I’ve been playing with her. I also have two cats, so I really enjoy just lounging around at home and pampering them.
Caddick: In my free time, I enjoy spending time with family, and a lot of times, that involves cooking. A favorite tradition of ours is a pizza and movie night—making our own pizza, sitting around watching a movie at home, and just relaxing.
Outside of that, we enjoy skiing when there’s snow and biking and swimming. Just trying to stay active and enjoy the lovely weather. Also, by necessity, I’m becoming a gardener because it seems like everything just does not stop growing in the Bay Area if you plant it. So, maybe a little bit of gardening on the side.