Eight Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers were recently honored by the Lab's Engineering Principal Associate Directorate for their efforts in raising the Lab's visibility and reputation through Strategic Partnership Projects (SPPs). The event was hosted by Rob Sharpe, Engineering's deputy principal associate director for research and development, who encouraged recipients to act as ambassadors for the program around the Lab.
SPPs are projects that LLNL does for customers outside the Department of Energy, who pay to access and leverage the Lab's world-class expertise and facilities. These partnerships are critical for transferring technology to the marketplace and building new capabilities and expertise at LLNL to support its national security mission.
"The magic of this program is where you do something incredibly important that addresses the need of the sponsor and enhances our capabilities," said Sharpe. "It takes a different kind of self-motivation, but it's valuable to our people, our Lab and our capabilities to engage with these external communities to vet ideas and build relationships."
These projects are also an important opportunity for Lab researchers to connect with the wider research community, receive feedback from outside perspectives, work across disciplines, and grow LLNL's national and international reputation as a "big ideas lab."
"There's a beautiful emergence of new ideas and insights that only occurs when different disciplines converge on a shared scientific goal," said Dante Ricci, Physical and Life Sciences (PLS) researcher and award recipient. "In the process of developing a strategy, dissecting data, and devising experiments within a multidisciplinary, novel ways of viewing old problems and fresh, invaluable perspectives can take the research in entirely unanticipated directions."
Lab researchers often need to go out of their way to initiate SPPs through proactively engaging sponsors, meeting difficult technical requirements, and developing proposals without guarantee of funding. Therefore, the Engineering awards honor perseverance, initiative, and effort - not success - and celebrate those who take the time to try and make a difference.
"Our sponsors can ask for the impossible, and if you make even partial progress toward those goals, you've made some significant breakthroughs," said award recipient and Materials Engineering Division (MED) researcher Maxim Shusteff. "That's why these projects are worthwhile. In the slightly paraphrased words of JFK, we choose to do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
The recipients all engaged multiple federal agencies - including Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the National Institute of Health and DARPA - universities, and private companies in the past fiscal year. Their collaborative projects and proposals include advancing volumetric additive manufacturing, using nanotechnology to digitize and enhance scent detection animals' abilities, searching for drugs to repurpose for ALS treatment, and creating a "database factory" for de novo antibody design.
Full list of recipients:
- Dan Faissol, Computational Engineering Division (CED)
- Razi Haque, MED
- Travis Massey, MED
- Monica Moya, MED
- Priyadip Ray, CED
- Dante Ricci, PLS
- Maxim Shusteff, MED
- Allison Yorita, MED
Learn more about SPPs and how to partner with LLNL here.
-Noah Pflueger-Peters
