December 30, 2002

Congressman Tim Bishop and DOE’s Ray Orbach visit NSLS

On Monday, December 30, Raymond Orbach, the Director of DOE’s Office of Science, journeyed to BNL to meet with U.S. Representative Timothy Bishop, the newly elected First District Congressman, who was visiting the Lab for the first time. The visitors, who included Office of Science advisor Todd Harding and Congressional staffer Lee Leshen, were welcomed by Peter Paul, BNL Interim Director, and Michael Holland, Manager of DOE¹s Brookhaven Area Office (BAO).

Highlights of Bishop’s brief tour of the Lab included a stop at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS). Doon Gibbs, Interim Associate Laboratory Director for Basic Energy Sciences, and NSLS Chair Steven Dierker explained a proposed NSLS upgrade which will dramatically improve the capabilities available to the approximately 2,500 researchers from scientific institutions and industry who use the NSLS for their research each year. They also discussed plans for the new BNL Center for Nanomaterials, for which Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham announced DOE approval when he visited the Lab last June 14.

Bishop, who was sworn in on Tuesday, January 7, and Orbach then visited the staff on the NSLS experimental floor and saw research results on osteoarthritis and the makeup of newly formed bone. They also met with facility-users whose findings about human papillomavirus may lead to drugs to prevent cervical cancer. At their next stop, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the visitors heard from Tim Hallman of the Physics Department about the world’s most energetic heavy-ion reactions which are recreating conditions that existed in the first few microseconds of the universe, and they saw collision events recorded with the huge STAR detector.

Bruce Gibbard, Physics, who directs the RHIC Computing Facility, described the technical effort needed to accept, translate, and store the RHIC collision events with thousands of tracks and make them available to about 1,000 users simultaneously. The tour ended with an overview of BNL’s pioneering neuro-imaging research on the brain chemistry of addiction, mental illness, and aging, from Nora Volkow, Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences. David Schlyer, Chemistry Department, also explained some recent research that includes imaging of awake animals.

SCIENCE WRITER: Liz Seubert

PHOTOS BY: Roger Stoutenburgh