Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The People of NIF
Pam Whitman—Adventurer and Leader
Whether camping on ice in Antarctica, kayaking among narwhals in the Arctic, or trekking in Bhutan, Pam Whitman works as hard outside her job as she does at NIF.
Juggling multiple hats at the Lab, she is NIF’s Loop Manager for Final Optics, Systems Engineer for the Optics Organization, as well as Group Leader for her home organization, Chemical Sciences. As hectic and challenging as that may be, she and her husband, Tom Parham, who also works at NIF, seek equally challenging endeavors when away from NIF.
“When we work, we work hard, but when we get away, we like to really get away,” says Pam. “We’ve been trekking in Nepal, Bhutan and Mongolia. We like to avoid tourists, see beautiful countryside, and interact with the local people.”
One typical trek, taken in 2000, was 16 days to two remote valleys northeast of Katmandu. In the true British fashion, the two of them were accompanied by a guide, a cook, his assistant, two kitchen boys and 4 porters.
Pam has breakfast in Bhutan with her guide.
We’d hike 8 to 10 miles a day, but lunch could be a 2 to 3 hour affair while the porters and cooks set up a kitchen and prepared an elaborate meal.”
“It’s best,” she says, “when the local children venture near out of curiosity to inspect these strangers and their gear. The parents tend to stay back a ways.”
Pam and Tom also enjoy kayaking trips, which they do locally at Pt. Reyes, Tomales Bay, Sausalito and Monterey Bay. But they’ve also kayaked in protected waters along five continents, including fjords on both the east and west coast of Greenland and around Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic nearby. “We kayaked with narwhals, walruses and bearded seals and camped among interesting whalebone and stone structures dating back to the Dorset people who lived there in 500 B.C.”
Pam and Tom kayaking in Antartica.
Pam in Antarctica with penguins.
They’ve also kayaked in Antarctica where they had to dig into the snow to erect their tent because of high winds. Though daunting, having the unique experience of penguins nearby watching made up for any discomfort.
Obviously not afraid to tackle a challenge, Pam is well suited for her job as NIF’s Loop Manager. The Loop process referred to is the installation, inspection, damage tracking, defect blocking, removal, mitigation and re-use of the 1600 square centimeters of final optics in NIF’s beamlines.
The process has evolved over the last 10 years, according to Whitman, from the time when damaged optics once had to simply be removed and replaced. Now, with the Final Optics Damage Inspection (FODI) system, which, when extended into the target chamber, can look all the way back from 6 to 200 meters down the beamlines, detailed images of the final optics and transport mirrors for all 192 beams can be produced.
As a result, microscopic defects can be tracked, evaluated, and even blocked from laser light with a programmable spatial shaper that can produce a mask to cover a defect, protecting it from further damage growth.
“If a defect eventually grows too large or there are too many in an optic, it can be removed and repaired utilizing newly developed mitigation processes that smooth out the defect and prevent it from growing. The optic can then be reused, thus completing the loop,” says Whitman. “The FODI has become an invaluable tool that enables the tracking, blocking, and mitigation of sites, and ultimate reuse of valuable laser optics.”
Whitman has been at the Lab and NIF for the past 15 years. She earned her BA and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in chemical engineering back when environmental laws were just emerging, which inspired her to enter the environmental remediation and waste reduction design and development field. Her first job was with Corning Glass in New York working on process improvement for waste reduction in production facilities. When her husband got a job at GE in Cleveland, she decided to go back to graduate school at Case Western, focusing on colloid science, the study of substances microscopically dispersed evenly throughout another substance, “a cross between material and chemical science,” she says. Whitman then worked at GE on coating processes for new and improved lamps. “My final project at GE was development of a wonderfully unique process for manufacturing a ‘spiral’ compact fluorescent lamp. The product was just moving into pilot production when we moved to LLNL. It was difficult to leave at such an exciting time,” Pam said.
She and Tom came out to Livermore in 1995 for some informal talks about working at the Lab, and Pam immediately said, “This is where I want to be.”
And this is where she’s been since then, helping develop processes to reduce defects on NIF’s final optics, pushing the performance levels of the optics beyond those of the mid-90s, and trying to eliminate defect sources. And of course, she’s been all around the world in her spare time as well.
