The Biden-Harris Administration has recognized former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) director John H. Nuckolls with the Enrico Fermi Award, one of the oldest and most prestigious science and technology honors bestowed by the U.S. government. The award will be shared with two other scientists, Héctor D. Abruña and Paul Alivisatos.
Nuckols was selected "for seminal leadership in inertial confinement fusion and high energy density physics, outstanding contributions to national security, and visionary leadership of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at the end of the Cold War."
The Enrico Fermi Presidential Award was established in 1956 as a memorial to the legacy of Enrico Fermi, an Italian-born naturalized American citizen. Fermi was a 1938 Nobel Laureate in physics, and he went on to achieve the first nuclear chain reaction in 1942. The Fermi Award encourages excellence in research in energy science and technology. The award recognizes scientists, engineers and science policymakers whose work benefits humanity.
"It's an honor to recognize three DOE scientists who have accomplished a tremendous feat of advancing scientific knowledge in nanoscience, electroanalytical chemistry and fusion," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. "The legacy of their work will be felt for generations as America continues be a global leader in technological innovation."
The three winners will each receive a citation signed by the President and the Secretary of Energy and a gold-plated medal bearing the likeness of Enrico Fermi. They will equally share an honorarium of $100,000. The Fermi Award is administered on behalf of the White House by the Department of Energy. In honor of the recipients and their accomplishments, DOE will host a hybrid award ceremony in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2025.
"I am honored and deeply appreciative of my selection for this award," Nuckolls said. "My contributions to our nation would not have been possible without Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, my colleagues and thousands of extraordinary people."
Nuckolls, who joined LLNL in 1955, is widely recognized as the scientific architect of the inertial fusion enterprise. Following the invention of the laser in 1960, he pursued the possibility of using high-power lasers to induce fusion in a laboratory setting. He and like-minded colleagues intensified their research in the early 1970s, publishing the seminal paper in the new field of inertial confinement fusion, "Laser Compression of Matter to Super-High Densities: Thermonuclear (CTR) Applications," in Nature 219, 139 (1972). This scientific work laid the foundation underlying several recent record-breaking experimental results to achieve fusion ignition at LLNL's National Ignition Facility.
In 1983, he was selected as associate director of physics and in 1988 became the Laboratory's seventh director, a role he held until 1994. Nuckolls' technical contributions and visionary leadership transformed LLNL's science and technology agenda and reputation, establishing inertial confinement fusion and high-energy-density physics as key components of the U.S. deterrence strategy and basic research portfolio and cementing the Laboratory as a multidisciplinary national security institution.
Nuckolls has received numerous awards and citations over his long career. Most notably, he received the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's E.O. Lawrence Award in 1969, the APS James Clerk Maxwell Prize in Plasma Physics in 1981 and the American Nuclear Society's Edward Teller Medal in 1991. Fusion Power Associates honored Nuckolls with its Leadership Award in 1982 and its Distinguished Career Award in 1996.
Other recipients of the Fermi Award who spent all or some of their careers at LLNL include: E.O. Lawrence (1957), Edward Teller (1962), Harold Brown (1992), John S. Foster (1992), Herbert York (2000) and Seymour Sack (2003).
