The German Research Foundation (DFG) recently awarded Lawrence Livermore engineer Brian Giera with the Mercator Fellowship, a three-year visiting professorship at the University of Duisburg-Essen, one of Germany’s largest universities. Giera’s fellowship is a direct result of a keynote speech he gave at the 2017 International Electrophoretic Deposition (EPD) Conference in Gyeongju, South Korea. In the speech, he described a nanoparticle-based simulation of EPD, a process commonly used to coat objects with materials using electrical fields. Once his fellowship begins in spring 2019, Giera will collaborate with University of Duisburg-Essen Professor Stephan Barcikowski on a project to develop a method for uniformly coating neural implants with biocompatible metallic nanoparticles, adding his computational expertise to the effort.
As with the U.S. National Science Foundation, the DFG is a central, independent research funding organization. The latter foundation is supported primarily by the German federal and state governments. With the Mercator Fellowship’s stipend, Giera will be able to travel to Germany several times each year, for a month or two at a time, to conduct research and give lectures.
Lawrence Livermore chemist Dawn Shaughnessy, whose team helped discover six new elements on the periodic table, has been elected a fellow of the American Chemical Society (ACS). At the Laboratory, Shaughnessy is the group leader for Experimental Nuclear and Radiochemistry and the principal investigator for the Heavy Element Group. She also led a group in naming heavy element 116, dubbed livermorium to honor the Laboratory and the city of Livermore, California. She and her team are currently working on a method to automate sample preparation and detection methods so that radiochemistry measurements will take one minute as opposed to up to five minutes when done by hand. The method, which will enable her team to analyze a single atom at a time, will also be applicable to other applications, including isotope analysis and nuclear forensics. The ACS fellows program began in 2009 to recognize and honor members for outstanding achievements in and contributions to science, the profession, and ACS itself.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has named Lori Diachin as its new deputy director, effective August 7, 2018. Diachin replaces Stephen Lee, who retired from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since 2017, Diachin has been serving as the Computation Directorate’s deputy associate director for science and technology at Livermore, where she has worked for 15 years. She previously worked at Sandia and Argonne national laboratories. She has held leadership roles in high-performance computing for more than 15 years. Her experience ranges from serving as director of the Laboratory’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing to leading multilaboratory teams such as the FASTMath SciDAC Institute and directing DOE’s HPC4Manufacturing and HPC4Materials programs.
ECP was launched in 2016 as a collaboration between DOE’s Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration to accelerate the delivery of an exascale computing ecosystem critical to DOE missions in national security, scientific discovery, and economic competitiveness. To achieve its goal of delivering exascale computing capabilities starting in 2021, ECP is developing strategies, aligning resources, and conducting research and design to deliver an ecosystem that includes mission-critical applications, a software stack, hardware architecture, and advanced system engineering and hardware components. ECP’s collaboration includes experts from six core national laboratories—Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Sandia—along with representatives from industry and academia.