January 09 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine
Anticipating and meeting user needs
LANL Star key to LANSCE experience
Leilani Conradson sets up a displex for Lujan Center users. The apparatus cools samples in a neutron scattering experiment to cryogenic temperatures near absolute zero. Photo by Sandra Valdez
Leilani Conradson of the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center is a woman of many talents. She is the experiment coordinator for the Lujan Neutron Scattering Center, as well as the LANSCE user program manager and division student liaison.
She also likes to travel with her family, concentrates better while listening to death metal music, and loves her pet rats, Arthur and Humphrey.
To the more than 700 researchers from all over the world who come to the Lujan Center annually to conduct experiments, Conradson is the nexus of the facility. She and her coworkers coordinate all aspects of the user experience at Lujan; ensure that users are provided with all necessary equipment, materials, and resources; manage user safety orientation and training; obtain the required authorization and records for all users, many of whom are foreign nationals; and schedule visits.
In recognition of her contributions to LANSCE, the Women's Diversity Working Group named Conradson a 2008 LANL Star. But Conradson said the Lujan and User Office staff deserves the award just as much as she does.
"I wouldn't be able to do this without my colleagues," she said. "We're very close, very supportive of one another."
Of Hawaiian heritage, Conradson received a baccalaureate degree in chemistry from San Jose State University. While at the university, she organized the Local and Nanoscale Structure in Complex Systems meeting in Santa Fe and worked at the Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science and the Stanford Synchroton Radiation Laboratory. Her experience as a user, Conradson said, helps her anticipate and meet users' needs. "I love helping the LANSCE users get their work done," said Conradson.
"I have a lot of autonomy, and that's allowed me to grow," she said. "But the best thing about my job is the people I work with. We're like a family."
—Tatjana K. Rosev
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