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Ringleaders & Postdocs

Monroe Thomas, Mechanical Technician

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 »

Karen Nunez, Procedures Center Manager

Procedures Center Manager Karen Nunez has been working somewhat “behind the scenes” at the ALS for the past seven years, ensuring that documentation for the many procedures involved in ALS operations is clear, correct, and up to date. She works with a plethora of ALS engineers, operators, technicians, and scientists, who all lend their technical expertise to her work. Read more »

Tim Kuneli, Electronics Maintenance Group

The recent ALS power supply failure was one of the most challenging projects that Electronics Engineer Technical Superintendent Tim Kuneli has worked on in his 12 years at the ALS. And judging by how quickly ALS engineering and accelerator physics staff resolved the issue and the ingenuity involved in the fix, it may also be one of the most successful projects he’s been involved in. Read more »

Ken Goldberg, Deputy Director of the Center for X-Ray Optics

Kenneth Goldberg, deputy director of the Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO), has been a part of the ALS since 1993, when he began setting up one of the first experiments on the floor, a project in coherent EUV optics. After completing his PhD in physics at Cal in 1997, Goldberg joined CXRO as a staff scientist. Read more »

Peter Nico, UEC Chair

Peter Nico, recently appointed chair of the UEC, brings a varied user perspective to his new post: like many environmental science users, Nico has worked at a number of different ALS beamlines, from hard x-ray tomography to x-ray diffraction to STXM to infrared. It’s the combination of these multiple capabilities that he sees as one of the greatest assets the ALS has to offer users. Read more »

Marc Allaire, Beamline Scientist, BCSB

Marc Allaire, the newest member of the Berkeley Center for Structural Biology (BCSB) team, joined the ALS in October as beamline scientist for Sector 5, which consists of Beamlines 5.0.1, 5.0.2, and 5.0.3. Allaire came to the ALS from Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he had been responsible for macromolecular crystallography (MX) beamlines and the biological small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) program. Read more »

Senior Scientist Musa Ahmed

In his 19 years at the ALS, senior scientist Musa Ahmed has seen chemistry grow from a somewhat obscure synchrotron science focus area to a cornerstone, award-winning ALS program. Ahmed was recently charged with leading the chemical sciences program for both ALS chemical dynamics beamlines, 9.0.1 and 11.0.2, which befits his long-standing enthusiasm and leadership in advancing chemistry research at the ALS. Read more »

Greta Toncheva and Robert Fairchild, Laser Safety Officers

“Safety is elemental” is the latest safety tagline for the ALS and Berkeley Lab, and it also pretty much sums up the mission of laser safety officers Greta Toncheva and Robert Fairchild. Toncheva and Fairchild share the responsibility of ensuring laser safety lab-wide, with Toncheva responsible for overseeing laser safety operations at the ALS. Read more »

Ring Leader: Elke Arenholz, Senior Scientist, Scientific Support Group

Senior scientist Elke Arenholz has seen a lot of changes at Beamlines 4.0.2 and 6.3.1 since she arrived at the ALS in 2000, but what brought her here initially is still what keeps her passionate about her work–designing new instrumentation and working with the user community to optimize research capabilities. Read more »