Ringleaders & Postdocs

As Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Energy Sciences, Don DePaolo oversees the ALS, Chemical Sciences, and Materials Sciences. He’s also a UC Berkeley Professor of Geochemistry in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. Though many ALS staff and users may not know him personally, DePaolo has been a key figure in the ALS/DOE relationship over the past few years. DePaolo will be retiring this year, but hopes to continue to work with the ALS in moving toward a facility upgrade. Read more »

Jay Nix started started the user program at Beamline 4.2.2 back in 2004, shortly after the Molecular Biology Consortium built the beamline. The macromolecular crystallography beamline is a little different than most at the ALS because it’s privately managed by a consortium of 10 Midwest universities that pooled their money together to build the beamline, and now continue to do so to maintain it. Nix serves about 50 labs, around 200 users, mostly remotely. Read more »

Cobber Lam started working at Berkeley Lab 10 years ago as a student assistant, while attending college at Cal State East Bay. Within two months, he was assigned to the ALS and has stayed put ever since. He used to be matrixed via IT, but last year he became a direct ALS employee. ALS IT support is divided between Lam and Tim Kellogg, with Lam being more forward-facing, dealing with users and staff, and Kellogg working on the back-end mostly with controls and operations groups. Read more »

We sat down recently with Principal Scientific Engineering Associate Warren Byrne to get his take on the history and future of the ALS, from an accelerator point of view. Byrne came to the ALS as it was being built in 1992, starting out in the operations group and then moving into the accelerator physics group. For the past 16 years, he has been in charge of overseeing the injector system, which consists of the linac and the booster synchrotron and the electron gun. Read more »

After many years as a researcher followed by a few in government and policy, Ashley White sees her new position as ALS Director of Communications as a perfect blend of it all. “I’m thrilled to be back in a research environment, since I started out my career as a researcher and loved being in the lab,” she says. “When I walk around the ALS and see all the tin foil and the beamline equipment, it feels like home.” Read more »

In his new role as ALS Engineering Lead, Ken Chow has taken on a consolidated role that was previously split between mechanical and electrical. As of August, a reorganization of ALS engineering has Chow overseeing all engineering tasks at the ALS, which includes magnetic and vacuum systems, mechanical engineering and technology, and electrical and controls engineering. Read more »

User office guest registration “specialists” Angel Hernandez and Giselle Jiles play a unique role at the ALS—they are often the first line of face-to-face contact new users have when they arrive for their beamtime. As such, the two see themselves as the caregivers of the ALS user experience.

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The weekend before the ALS was scheduled to start up again after the most recent shutdown, mechanical technician Monroe Thomas kept things running on schedule by coming in on a Saturday to pull a 300-pound capacitor “uphill” out of the new RF power supply. It’s just another “(not so) typical” day at work for him, he says. But it’s his reliability operating cranes and supervising moves of heavy equipment around the ALS that plays an integral role in keeping the facility going. Read more »