Sabbatical Opportunities

For university faculty members, a sabbatical leave is one of the most valued perks in academic life. Typically, a sabbatical means an opportunity every seventh year to conduct research for several months, or sometimes a full academic year, without a teaching workload. An increasing number of faculty members are choosing to spend their sabbaticals at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

LLNL's Sabbatical Scholars Program was designed to bring top-flight scientific and engineering expertise into the Laboratory, including the National Ignition Facility. This program gives visiting professors the opportunity to conduct research in one of the world's premier applied science and engineering centers, and Livermore scientists have the opportunity to collaborate with some of the best scientific minds in the world. LLNL also encourages participating faculty to include students and postdocs in their sabbatical experience.

Between 2003 and 2006, four faculty members spent their sabbaticals at NIF under this program:

Professor Edison Liang from Rice University accompanied by grad student Dan Kocevski (left) and postdoc Kiochi Noguchi (right), took a six-month sabbatical at NIF to study astrophysics applications of intense lasers.Dr. Edison Liang, professor of astrophysics at Rice University, spent five months on sabbatical at NIF in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Remington. Professor Liang, accompanied by one graduate student and one postdoc, performed in-depth studies of the astrophysics applications of intense lasers. Using large-scale computer simulations and analytic methods, his team studied the feasibility of producing relativistic magnetized plasmas, including electron–positron plasmas, using ultra-intense lasers. Professor Liang also investigated the scalabilty of the physics of such plasmas and performed conceptual designs of laboratory experiments.

Dr. R. Paul Drake, a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences and the Department of Applied Physics at the University of Michigan, conducted an eight-month sabbatical at NIF in 2003, also in collaboration with Dr. Bruce Remington. His research focused on the fundamental understanding of high energy density systems and their application to laboratory astrophysics. This included radiative hydrodynamics, the onset of turbulence in energetic hydrodynamic systems and diagnostics for measuring such phenomena. Professor Drake included three graduate students and a postdoc in his sabbatical experience.

NIF sabbatical scholar Edward Morse from the University of California at Berkeley examines Livermore's Pelletron, a positron accelerator. Materials experiments will be performed on this accelerator by a UCB–Livermore team.Dr. Edward Morse, professor of nuclear engineering at U.C. Berkeley, spent eight months on sabbatical at LLNL, partially supported by NIF. Professor Morse worked with Laboratory scientists to develop a neutron imaging diagnostic tool for NIF and oversaw tests of the new detector, using neutrons generated at both Livermore and U.C. Berkeley facilities. He has also developed detectors that use diamonds to achieve unprecedented sensitivity.

Dr. George Tynan, professor of engineering science in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at U.C. San Diego, completed a five-month sabbatical at LLNL in 2005–2006. His visit to the Laboratory included the participation of a graduate student. Professor Tynan's research involved novel experiments on electron thermal transport in plasmas with externally controlled magnetic fields, and using the results to validate numerical simulations of those processes. Professor Tynan was hosted by Dr. Siegfried Glenzer. Their joint research resulted in a paper that was published in Physical Review Letters.

More Information

"Faculty on Sabbatical Find a Good Home at Livermore," Science & Technology Review, April 2005