Three Lawrence Livermore teams received Secretary’s Appreciation Awards from the Department of Energy (DOE) for providing assistance to the Ebola task force, the Cancer Moonshot team, and the technology convergence working group. The awards were presented by Dimitri Kusnezov, chief scientist for the National Nuclear Security Administration and DOE.
As part of the Ebola task force, Livermore researchers used their expertise in protein structure prediction along with viral genomic sequence data derived from patients to forecast how the evolution of the viral genome might alter the efficacy of treatment options that were in development. Members were Jonathan Allen, Tom Bates, Reg Beer, Monica Borucki, Alda Carrillo, Shea Gardner, Erret Hobbs, Pejman Naraghi-Arani, Jason Paragas, Jason Perry, David Rakestraw, Gabriele Rennie, Tom Slezak, Elizabeth Vitalis, Michael Woods, Adam Zemla, and Carol Zhou.
The Cancer Moonshot team worked together with researchers from Argonne, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge national laboratories to push the frontiers of computing and align them with the research priorities of the National Cancer Institute. Members were Ghaleb Abdulla, Jim Brase, Bill Goldstein, Amy Gryshuk, Jason Paragas, David Rakestraw, and Fred Streitz.
The technology convergence working group was formed because advances in biosciences and biotechnology have resulted in changes to this area’s threat space and received high-level attention in the U.S. national security community. The work was conducted along with Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. Livermore members were Tom Bates, Jim Brase, Patricia Falcone, Bill Goldstein, Jason Paragas, Jason Perry, and David Rakestraw.
Four Livermore programs have been awarded research and development grants by the High Energy Laser Joint Technology Office (HEL-JTO) within the Department of Defense to launch key partnerships with leading defense, industry, and academic institutions. These research partnerships carry a prospective combined value of more than $2.2 million for the Laboratory through the JTO, which coordinates efforts to develop foundational science for directed-energy laser programs.
The “Multi-Core Fiber for Automation of Fiber Laser Fabrication” program is a collaboration with Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Livermore researchers will apply their ability to fabricate fiber optics with ultrapure materials in customized precision forms and bundles in diameters thinner than a human hair.
In collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the National Ignition Facility’s Fiber Laser Group is leading development of fiber optics capable of advancing the science of directed energy. The work is being conducted for the “Anti-Resonant Tube Fibers for Directed Energy Lasers” program.
The goal of the “All-Fiber Raman-Beam-Combined High-Repetition-Rate Eye-Safe Tracking Illuminator Lasers” program is to develop directed-energy lasers by utilizing wavelengths that will not blind the users. The program collaborates with the Army Research Laboratory.
The “Additively Manufactured Waveguiding Gain Elements” program pairs up the Laboratory’s N Program within the Global Security Principal Directorate and the Additive Manufacturing Initiative to build in optical control of a laser beam by tailoring the structure of waveguiding ceramic gain media.