Ringleaders & Postdocs

Chuck Swenson came to Berkeley Lab five years ago from Los Alamos National Laboratory. He joined the the magnetic and vacuum systems group at the ALS, where he’s now group leader and looking forward to diving into the ALS Upgrade project, ALS-U. Read more »

Isvar Cordova has been at the ALS since February 2016, working as a postdoc at Beamline 11.0.1, the resonant soft x-ray scattering beamline, developing in-situ capabilities for material research. We sat down with him to talk about his background and what he’s enjoying about his experience at the ALS. Read more »

Fernando Sannibale, previously the principal investigator of the Advanced Photoinjector Experiment (APEX) at LBNL, has recently taken on a new role as leader of the ongoing ALS Accelerator Physics program in the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division and will also serve as the ALS Division Deputy for Accelerator Operations and Development. We recently sat down with Sannibale to talk about his years at the ALS and what he hopes to accomplish in his new role. Read more »

Ruimin Qiao arrived at the ALS seven years ago as a PhD student and is now a postdoctoral researcher working with ALS Staff Scientist Wanli Yang at Beamline 8.0.1. Last month she was selected as the overall winner of the first-ever ALS/Molecular Foundry Science Slam. Read more »

Andreas Scholl recently became a senior staff scientist, a job title that he sees not necessarily as indicative of a different job, but rather of the gradual change in his responsibilities over his 18 years at the ALS. Read more »

As operations supervisor at the ALS, Tom Scarvie works with the accelerator operators and floor operators to make sure that the machine runs as well as possible and that beamline work is done safely and according to policy. The operations team strives to make sure the ALS is running reliably and at top quality all the time. Scarvie is also one of three chairs of the ALS Beamline Review Committee and he chairs the Accelerator Review Committee. Read more »

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 »