About Engineering

Staff Biographies

Matrix System

Organization

Special Capabilities & Unique Facilities

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's primary mission is national security, but it also provides R&D expertise in energy, the environment, and biotechnology. This mission involves balancing the demand for short-term deliverables with the need for long-term technical competencies. Our staff of engineers, technicians, craftspeople, machinists, and other technical and administrative personnel form the foundation for most work performed at the Laboratory. This is because 80 percent of Engineering employees are matrixed to (that is, have work assignments in) a wide range of Laboratory programs. So Engineering plays a unique role in providing not only engineering standards for the Laboratory, but also a degree of continuity and stability. By helping the Laboratory accomplish its mission, we define and accomplish our own:

Enable program success today and ensure the Laboratory's vitality tomorrow.

In Engineering, we undertake projects with high technical risk, integrate and extend technologies concurrently, and use the extremes of both ultrascale and microscale to achieve results. We develop systems that push technologies to their extremes (such as very large and very precise at the same time).

The thrust of our work reflects this competency:

In particular, Engineering has a hand in most of the Laboratory's deliverables, such as the engineering design for nuclear weapons or the design, fabrication, and installation of the target chamber, beampath infrastructure, and computer control systems for the National Ignition Facility. Our work emphasizes highly complex systems engineering that involves substantial technical risk.

Engineering also designs, builds, and operates most of the unique experimental facilities at LLNL. In addition to reaching our programmatic milestones, we conduct multidisciplinary engineering R&D in broad-application technologies.

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July 9, 2012