Lawrence Livermore researchers John Elmer, Holly Carlton, and Randy Pong, along with Jay Vaja of the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, received the American Welding Society’s McKay-Helm Award for their 2015 Welding Journal paper describing the effect of argon and nitrogen shielding gas on reducing, or even eliminating, porosity in laser welds in steel, stainless steel, and nickel. The findings could have implications for improving metal laser-powder-bed or wire three-dimensional printing, which often result in porous final products.
Bioinformatics scientist
Jonathan Allen has been selected to serve on a
National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine Panel that will study the interface between microbiomes—microbial communities—and human-built environments. Allen, a researcher in Lawrence Livermore’s Global Security Principal Directorate, will be part of the 15-member committee that will identify key research gaps in understanding how building infrastructure design affects human health. The panel is sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Christopher Barty, the chief technology officer for the Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility and Photon Science Principal Directorate, has won the
2016 Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Harold E. Edgerton Award for his work on ultrafast lasers and laser-based x-ray and gamma-ray science. The Harold E. Edgerton Award is presented annually for outstanding contributions to optical or photonic techniques in the application and understanding of high-speed physical phenomena. Edgerton (1903–1990) was an MIT professor known for his pioneering efforts to photographically capture fast physical events. In the 1950s, he produced the first photographs of the initial phases of nuclear explosions.
