On Monday (Sept. 15), former National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronaut Sid Gutierrez will deliver a talk on space travel. Gutierrez was pilot of a nine-day space shuttle mission in 1991 and commander of an 11-day flight in 1994.
Gutierrez's talk, sponsored by the Laboratory's Hispanic Diversity Working Group as part of Hispanic Heritage Month activities, will begin at noon in the Laboratory Administration Building Auditorium. Gutierrez is retired from the U.S. Air Force and NASA and currently works at Sandia National Laboratories.
On Tuesday (Sept. 16), Charles Mader will give a Director's Colloquium describing how he has maintained creativity as a scientist, namely shifting career paths after 30 years from numerical modeling of explosives to modeling tsunami waves generated by earthquakes, landslides or asteroid impacts and how the waves run up on shorelines. Techniques he has developed are now used by the National Oceanics and Atmospheric Administration in its tsunami warning centers and in preparing evacuation plans.
Mader is a retired Laboratory Fellow and was for 10 years a senior fellow at a University of Hawaii tsunami research center. His talk begins at 1:15 p.m. in the Laboratory's Physics Building Auditorium.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, is operated by Los Alamos National Security, LLC, a team composed of Bechtel National, the University of California, The Babcock & Wilcox Company, and Washington Group International for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration.
Los Alamos enhances national security by ensuring the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile, developing technologies to reduce threats from weapons of mass destruction, and solving problems related to energy, environment, infrastructure, health, and global security concerns.