June 4-5, 2007

NSLS Joins Facility Users From Across the Nation at Annual Meeting

Sixty-three elected User Organization Chairs and managers of user facility offices across the country met on June 4-5, 2007 at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) for the annual National User Facility Organization (NUFO) meeting. NUFO, an outgrowth of a long-standing informal regular meeting of user facility administrators, today includes elected User Organization Chairs and facilitates communication between users, user organizations, government-funded laboratories, and elected representatives to open dialogs about the benefits and issues of specific relevance to users of these facilities. This year’s meeting focused on the strategic directions for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science user facilities as an outgrowth of the National Academy of Sciences report, “The Gathering Storm.” LBNL’s Jeff Troutman organized the meeting, with assistance from Brookhaven’s Susan White-DePace and Susan Strasser of Argonne National Laboratory.

Participants in the 2007 National User Facility Organization meeting

The first day of the meeting included presentations by Richard Herman, Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology; Chris King, U. S. House of Representatives Science Committee staff member; Steve Pierson, from the American Physical Society; and Steve Chu, Director of LBNL. Herman addressed university, national laboratory, and private sector partnerships to improve national competitiveness, King and Pierson discussed grass-roots campaigns and the importance of conveying the impact and applications of science at national user facilities to nonscientists. The agenda also allowed for discussions of plans for the upcoming year, including formalizing a charter for the organization, compiling user statistics for all federally funded national user facilities, and planning outreach activities.

The second day of the meeting focused on user-related issues of concern to all facilities, specifically safety, proprietary usage rules and processes, and cyber security. Martin Purschke, head of Brookhaven’s Cyber Security Advisory Council, described computer security at BNL from the user’s perspective. Following his presentation, Dwayne Ramsey and Adam Stone from LBNL indicated how computer security issues may affect national user facilities. The meeting concluded with breakout sessions for subgroups and disciplines.

Chairs or representatives from all three of the Brookhaven user organizations were in attendance at this meeting, including: Jean Jordan-Sweet (NSLS); Peter Bennett (Center for Functional Nanomaterials); and John Hill, Brant Johnson, and Rene Bellwied (RHIC & AGS). Michael Bennett and Howard Gordon represented U.S. ATLAS. Staff members attending from these three offices included Gretchen Cisco, Kathy Nasta, Grace Webster, and Susan White-DePace.

ARTICLE BY: Susan White-DePace