November 16, 2004

The Hill Comes to the Lab

Energy & Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee personnel visit BNL

Visiting the Lab on Tuesday, October 26, were Kevin Cook, Majority Clerk of the Energy & Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee (EWDAS) and Dixon Butler, EWDAS Minority Professional Staff Member. Welcomed by BNL Director Praveen Chaudhari, DOE Brookhaven Site Office Manager Michael Holland, Deputy BNL Director for Operations Michael Bebon, and Assistant Lab Director for Community, Education, Government & Public Affairs Marge Lynch, the visitors, with Jack Bagley of Battelle's Washington Office, toured selected facilities to see more of BNL's research capabilities and learn about site infrastructure.

Standing near the viewing window in the NSLS lobby are Brookhaven Lab Director Praveen Chaudhari; Steve Dierker, NSLS Chairman and Associate Laboratory Director for Light Sources; Kevin Cook, Majority Clerk of the Energy & Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee (EWDAS); and Dixon Butler, EWDAS Minority Professional Staff Member. Elaine Lowenstein, of Brookhaven's Community Relations group (foreground), led the group on a tour of the facility.

At the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), which draws annually more than 2,500 researchers from the U.S. and overseas to join Lab scientists in studying physics, chemistry, materials science, biochemistry, geophysics, and medicine, Associate Laboratory Director for Light Sources and NSLS Chair Steven Dierker gave an overview of the facility and plans for its upgrade as well as for the proposed NSLS-II. Doon Gibbs, Associate Laboratory Director for Basic Energy Sciences, and Robert Hwang, Director of the Center for Functional Nanomaterials, discussed BNL's thriving nanoscience program.

The STAR detector at BNL's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provided another stop on the agenda. Derek Lowenstein, Collider-Accelerator Department Chair, and STAR spokesperson Timothy Hallman of the Physics Department described the RHIC facility and explained some of the physics being explored there. At RHIC, more than 1,000 researchers are working on four experimental teams to recreate and analyze conditions believed to have occurred during the earliest stages of the universe.

On a tour to look at site infrastructure, Bebon showed the visitors the recent improvements to the Materials Sciences Department in Building 480 and talked about near- and longterm plans being made for the needs of various areas of the Lab.

Lowenstein, with Betsy Sutherland of the Biology Department, outlined the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA) and BNL research on the possible risks to humans exposed to space radiation. These studies, which use proton and ion beams that simulate the cosmic rays found in space, are done at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory, known as the NSRL, operational at BNL since July 2003.

Another high-profile BNL initiative, medical imaging, was the focus of a stop at the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) facility. There, Helene Benveniste, Associate Laboratory Director for Life Sciences, and PET Program Director Joanna Fowler, Chemistry Department, described the Lab's pioneering work in probing the brain chemistry of addiction, mental illness, and aging, and other recent work to find effective treatments and on imaging awake animals.

ARTICLE BY: Liz Seubert