Amanda Randles, a Lawrence Fellow in Livermore’s Computation Directorate, received a Director’s Early Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This NIH Common Fund award provides funding to encourage exceptional young scientists to pursue high-risk, high-reward independent research in biomedical and behavioral science. Randles will receive approximately $2.5 million over five years, which will allow her to combine personalized, massively parallel computational models and experimental approaches to develop a way of predicting likely sites for cancer to metastasize. The goal of the project is to develop a method to simulate the flow of realistic levels of cells through the circulatory system, thereby gaining insight into mechanisms that underlie disease progression and localization. Randles is one of 85 recipients of the 2014 NIH Common Fund grants.
Livermore engineer Scott Couture received an award for Meritorious Civilian Service from the U.S. Air Force for his work as principal adviser for nuclear plans and policies to the Under Secretary of the Air Force, Eric Fanning. Couture, who works in the Laboratory’s Weapons and Complex Integration (WCI) Principal Directorate, served as principal adviser from May 2012 until May 2014. Since joining Lawrence Livermore in 1992, Couture has worked on robotics for nuclear waste handling and on precision machine tools for the National Ignition Facility. More recently, for WCI, he has contributed to weapons surveillance, annual assessments, and plutonium shipping containers.
Radoslav Radev received the International Electrotechnical Commission’s (IEC’s) 1906 Award for his work on developing international standards for radiation detection instrumentation. Radev has served as an expert on the Nuclear Instrumentation Technical Committee and its Radiation Protection Instrumentation Subcommittee since 2002. He received this recognition for his exceptional contributions to the development of more than a dozen international standards for radiation protection instruments and for border control instrumentation preventing illicit trafficking of radioactive and special nuclear material. The IEC 1906 Award also distinguished Radev for being the project leader for the major revision of the IEC 61005 “Neutron Ambient Dose Equivalent (Rate) Meters” standard, published in 2014.
Founded in 1906 and based in Geneva, Switzerland, the IEC is the world’s leading organization for developing and publishing international standards for all electrical, electronic, and related technologies. More than 10,000 experts from industry, commerce, government, research labs, and academia participate in IEC’s standardization work.
Harold Conner, Jr., associate director of Facilities and Infrastructure (F&I) within the Laboratory’s Operations and Business Principal Directorate, received the Alumni Professional Achievement Award from his alma mater, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. This award recognizes alumni who have achieved a high level of success in their field and who have a record of notable career accomplishments and a history of outstanding contributions to their profession.
Conner has a long list of career accomplishments. Prior to joining Livermore in 2007 as the associate director of F&I, Conner logged 40 years of experience with the Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) leading nonnuclear, nuclear, low-hazard, and high-hazard operations. He built an extensive record of safely and cost-effectively managing and revitalizing facilities and infrastructure at the Savannah River Site, Oak Ridge Y-12, Oak Ridge K-25, and Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
Lawrence Livermore members of NNSA’s Advanced Manufacturing Road Map Development Team (AM Team) received the NNSA’s Defense Programs Award of Excellence for their work performed in support of the Stockpile Stewardship Program in 2014 (see the article beginning on p. 4). The award honors significant achievements in quality, productivity, cost savings, safety, or creativity in support of the nuclear weapons program. The Livermore-led AM Team includes 62 researchers from Livermore, Kansas City National Security Campus, Y-12 National Security Complex, Pantex Plant, Savannah River Site, and Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. The multidisciplinary team worked together to perform a thorough assessment of the AM technologies that could be used to transform the nuclear security enterprise, and produced a detailed reference document and road map that laid out a path forward for the Defense Program’s investment in this area.
The Lawrence Livermore members of the AM Team include Melissa Marggraff, Robert Maxwell, Alexander Gash, Jon Maienschein, Wayne King, Daniel Orlikowski, Joshua Kuntz, Thomas Wilson, Mark Bronson, Brandon Chung, Geoffrey Campbell, Diane Chinn, Gilbert Gallegos, Eric Duoss, Christopher Spadaccini, Mona Dreicer, Steven Peterson, Cynthia Brandt, Cary Spencer, and George Anzelon.