Twenty-six LLNL researchers have been named Distinguished Members of Technical Staff (DMTS) for their extraordinary scientific and technical contributions, as acknowledged by their professional peers and the broader scientific community. As distinguished citizens of the Laboratory and their scientific areas of specialization, DMTS honorees have a sustained history of exceptional achievements and service-minded leadership as role models and mentors in their field. The Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program has provided support for 20 of the 26 awardees.
DMTS is the highest technical staff level achievable by a scientist or engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is a prestigious recognition on the personnel ladder. Appointment to DMTS is reserved for Laboratory scientists and engineers who have demonstrated at least one of the following:
- A sustained history of high-level achievements in programs of importance to the Laboratory.
- A sustained history of distinguished scientific and technical achievements, having become a recognized authority in the field.
- A fundamental and important discovery that has had sustained, widespread impact.
Roger Aines - Global Security
A pillar of the Laboratory community since 1984, Roger Aines leads the Carbon Initiative, dedicated to understanding and developing ways to remove CO2 from the air. As a principal investigator for five LDRD projects, Aines has harnessed LLNL’s multidisciplinary expertise to provide meaningful and innovative solutions to climate change. The collaborative Carbon Initiative team helps government and businesses plan for a net-zero carbon future, and the team’s groundbreaking "Getting to Neutral" report has become a trusted resource in the global climate conversation. Aines received a B.A. in chemistry from Carleton College and a Ph.D. in geochemistry from California Institute of Technology.
Anna Maria Bailey - Computing
Anna Maria Bailey has more than 33 years of experience in multiple engineering roles at LLNL, notably as the design/construction manager for LLNL’s HPC Center, which houses some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, from 2000–2004. As program project manager, she recently oversaw the construction of an $111 million exascale facility modernization project completed 9 months ahead of schedule and $9 million under budget. Additionally, her extensive engineering experience allowed her to lead the effort to earn energy efficiency certifications for two HPC facilities. Bailey currently leads the HPC Integrated Project Team construction portfolio and oversees the El Capitan site infrastructure project while serving as the co-chair of the Energy Efficient HPC Working Group (EEHPCWG) of nearly 1,000 HPC professionals worldwide. She holds a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and is registered with the California Board for Professional Engineers and Land Surveyors as an Electrical Engineer.
Lars Borg - Physical and Life Sciences
Lars Borg is a cosmochemist in the LLNL Chemical & Isotopic Signatures group. His research interests include geochronology and geochemistry of samples from asteroids, the moon and Mars to constrain the nature and timing of processes occurring in the proto-planetary disk and planetary bodies early in the history of the solar system. In particular, he is interested in constraining the sources of nucleosynthetic materials in the nascent solar nebula using stable heavy isotopes and the defining timing of the formation and differentiation of the terrestrial planets using long- and short-lived isotopic chronometers. He received a B.A. in earth science and paleontology from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. in igneous petrology from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in isotope geochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin.
Robert Canaan - Weapons and Complex Integration
With almost 25years of experience at LLNL, Robert Canaan has contributed to the Weapons and Complex Integration (WCI) directorate and Global Security’s Z Division. After coming to the Lab as a nuclear engineer in 1998, Canaan was promoted to nuclear weapons design physicist and ultimately group leader in Primary Nuclear Design. Canaan has supported many programs in WCI including Stockpile Stewardship, the Annual Assessment Review, nuclear counter terrorism, nuclear forensics, nuclear emergency response and nuclear weapon safety/security (surety). His surety work formed the basis for LLNL’s current simulation-based surety design and assessment methods. By drawing on his expertise in primary nuclear design and counter terrorism, Canaan now supports the International Assessments team as a senior intelligence analyst performing design-informed intelligence analysis of foreign nuclear programs, specializing in South and Central Asia. He received a B.S. and M.S. in nuclear engineering from Texas A&M University and a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
Long Dinh - Physical and Life Sciences
With more than 28 years of experience at LLNL, Long Dinh is widely recognized as an expert on weapon science and has developed several kinetic models for material aging that are relied upon by stockpile system engineers to predict component and material lifetimes. Dinh also provided recommendations supporting the B61, W80, W87 and B83 LEPs. As an applied scientist in the Materials Science Division, Dinh serves as a subject matter expert for a wide spectrum of material issues associated with the Laboratory’s weapons program. His scientific expertise in lithium, plutonium and gaseous release/uptake in solids is recognized across the nuclear weapons complex; the results of measurements conducted by his team are continually relied upon for stockpile assessments. Dinh’s research interests include nanoclusters and thin films, surface related phenomena, optical spectroscopy, materials interaction/compatibility, solid-state devices and chemical kinetics. Dinh received his Ph.D. degree in engineering-applied science from the University of California at Davis.
Todd Gamblin - Computing
Since joining LLNL in 2007, Todd Gamblin has established himself as a leader in combinatorial solver technologies for package management and as an internationally known High Performance Computing (HPC) researcher. He devised a novel dependency model and created Spack, an open-source tool that ;enables HPC users to integrate increasingly complex software. It has had positive impacts on DOE and the worldwide HPC community and was honored with an R&D 100 award in 2019. As a computer scientist in CASC and Livermore Computing, Gamblin has mentored 18 staff, six postdocs and 27 students at LLNL. He has been a tireless advocate for software developers, pioneering the rollout of collaboration tools for developers across the Lab and spearheading improvements to LLNL's open-source policies and processes. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in computer science from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and his B.A. in computer science from Williams College.
John Heebner - Engineering
John Heebner joined LLNL in 2003 to lead the design, development and qualification of the Pre-Amplifier Modules providing most of the laser gain for the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Later, he led the high-contrast upgrade for the Advanced Radiographic Capability and continues to serve as chief scientist for Injection Laser Systems. He also is chief scientist for directed energy programs in NIF. As a group leader, Heebner leads the Ultrafast Optical and Electronics Systems group pioneering technologies bridging gaps between ultrafast optics and high bandwidth electronics. He has received four R&D 100 awards: SLIDER (2011); LEOPARD (2012); SHIELD (2013); and Efficient Mode-Converters (2013); three Director’s S&T awards, and an Early andMid-Career Recognition (EMCR)award. He has served on committees for the Missile Defense Agency and LLNL’s LDRD program, led multiple LDRD projects advancing the field of laser optics and was named fellow of the Optical Society of America (Optica) in 2017. He received his Ph.D. in optics and M.S. in optical engineering from the University of Rochester.
Steven Jensen - Engineering
Steven Jensen has more than 25 years of work experience at LLNL, most recently working as flight test director of the current LIDSS Enterprise. He grew the Lab’s Flight Test organization from a small group of six individuals supporting 1-2 missions a year to a team of 25-plus with support requirements of 8-10 missions a year supporting more than 60missions over a 5-year span. He established a statistically rigorous test methodology for environmentally testing of the W80-3 warhead that has now become a baseline standard for testing certification of a stockpile weapon system. Jensen also works with universities to identify areas where LLNL can partner with students to fund research projects that expand technologies at significantly reduced costs while opening pipelines for new hires. He received a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Brigham Young University and an M.S. in mechanical engineering from Purdue University.
Stephen Klein - Physical and Life Sciences
Stephen Klein joined LLNL as a research scientist in the Climate Sciences Group in 2004. He is a world leader in cloud processes research, climate sensitivity and climate modeling, having pioneered the development of innovative “simulators” to facilitate the use of satellite cloud observations by the climate modeling community and the utilization of weather-forecast techniques to evaluate cloud-related processes in climate models. His research formed a foundation for understanding the impact of low clouds on Earth’s energy budget, climate variability and change. Klein was a leader of the international effort to produce a new estimate of climate sensitivity, which has narrowed the range of Earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity from the often-quoted range of between 1.5°K and 4.5° K to likely between 2.6° K and 3.9° K. The American Meteorological Society named him a fellow in 2020. He received a B.A. in physics from Oberlin College and a Ph. D. from the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington.
Scott Kohn - Computing
Scott Kohn first joined LLNL as a computational scientist in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) in 1997 and currently serves as the associate program leader forAdvanced Computingin the Information Operations and Analytics Program. He was a founding leader of Advanced Computing work in Global Security, and now oversees the IRONWOOD project spanning nine institutions and 50 contributors. Scott’s current research investigates post-Moore’s Law computing technologies and his continued research interests include cybersecurity, network protocol analysis, large-scale data analysis, graph analysis and high-performance and data-intensive computing. He received an R&D 100 award in 2006 for Babel, a framework for enabling different software components written in different languages to interoperate. Kohn chaired the LDRD Cyber, Space, and Intelligence committee for five years. The University of California at San Diego granted him a M.S and Ph.D. in computer science, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison granted his B.S in electrical engineering, computer science and mathematics.
Mukul Kumar - Engineering
Mukul Kumar joined LLNL in 1998 to work in the emerging areas of grain boundary engineering and orientation microscopy. He and his colleagues developed the concept of grain boundary network crystallography and its influence on fracture behavior in extreme environments. The seminal publications on grain boundary properties and long-range crystallographic correlations in materials microstructure are some of the most-cited in the field. Concurrently, Kumar‘s research significantly improved the understanding of how microstructure influences dynamic failure and fracture, critical to defense applications design. The work of his team using in situ X-ray imaging methods has opened new avenues in our understanding of the dynamic compression response of architected materials and composites. He is currently a principal investigator on multiple weapons physics-related projects and affiliated with the Institute for Shock Physics at Washington State University as an adjunct professor. Kumar was granted a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Cincinnati in materials science and engineering.
Stephen Libby - Physical and Life Sciences
A pioneer in the national security applications of atomic interferometers, Stephen Libby has contributed to LLNL in a wide variety of capacities since 1985. Currently serving as the Theory and Modeling group leader in the Physics Division, he is a key advocate and innovator for LLNL Quantum Information Science. He led a team quantifying LiD EOS theoretical uncertainty for WCI, conducted the first field test and validation of an atom interferometer gyroscope and oversaw the first demonstration of cold atom interferometer gravity tomography with AOSense, Inc. He also co-leads an ion trap quantum-computing project with NIST (Boulder). Libby invented a novel algorithm for non-LTE radiation applicable to ICF hohlraums/weapons physics. Before coming to LLNL, he co-discovered the scaling theory of the quantum Hall effect and co-developed the factorization program for quantum chromodynamics. He received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Princeton University in 1977 and is a fellow of the APS.
Felice Lightstone - Physical and Life Sciences
Felice Lightstone joined LLNL as a postdoc in the Biology and Biotechnology Research Program in 2001 and was the first to use LLNL Secure Computing resources for biology applications in 2004. Lightstone was instrumental in building the computational biology effort at LLNL into a world-leading capability. She co-created the Drug Discovery and Development program and bolstered the Lab’s reputation as a trusted partner with new stakeholders from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies and nonprofit organizations. She has led multiple LDRD projects advancing electronic structure methods, atomistic modeling and molecular dynamics simulations and currently serves as associate program lead for LLNL’s Medical Countermeasures Program and group leader in PLS. Outside the Lab, Lightsone has been the director of the American Heart Association’s Center for Accelerated Drug Discovery since 2018 and is a board member of the Western States Affiliate of the American Heart Association. The University of California at Santa Barbara granted her Ph.D. in chemistry.
Marty Marinak - Weapons and Complex Integration
Marty Marinak leads the HYDRA code project which supports design and simulation of various types of ICF targets across the national program. He also oversees code development performed in WSC for the ICF program and plans for new simulation capabilities. Marinak's earlier work was instrumental in enabling HYDRA to perform the first 3D simulations of ICF capsules and hohlraums, forming the underlying basis for simulations now routinely done. The 3D design tool provided important insights and guidance, helping NIF experiments to surpass Lawson’s ignition criterion for the very first time. Marinak feels fortunate to lead an exceptional group of code developers. He is a co-recipient of the APS DPP 2022 John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research, and Director’s S&T Awards in 2021 and 2022. He was named Physics and Space Technology Directorate Outstanding Postdoctoral Researcher of the Year in 1995. Marinak received a B.S and Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.
Celeste Matarazzo - Computing
Since joining LLNL as a staff computer scientist in 1987, Celeste Matarazzo has contributed strategic vision, management oversight and technical leadership to the Computing Directorate in a wide variety of roles. Through August 2022, she served as the Cybersecurity associate program leader, leading a team of 60-plus researchers in developing innovative applications of data science technologies for cybersecurity. Matarazzo was responsible for the successful seven-year leadership of SEQUOIA, with sustained program growth of nearly 30%. She’s been instrumental in developing a Cybersecurity staff pipeline through the creation and leadership of the CyberDefenders student internship program. As a principal investigator, Matarazzo led two LDRD Strategic Initiatives resulting in important transition of technologies to LLNL and programmatic sponsors and has served as a Cybersecurity, Space Security, and Intelligence committee reviewer since 2009. She received a B.S. in mathematics and computer science from Adelphi University and completed graduate studies in mathematics and computer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
John Moody - NIF and Photon Sciences
Having joined LLNL in 1991 to perform laser-plasma interaction research and cryogenic studies in the NIF/ICF program, John Moody has become a vital contributor to the success of the National Ignition Facility/Inertial Confinement Fusion (NIF/ICF) program. Now a senior scientist and the deputy for experiments in the ICF program, Moody previously served as co-lead for hohlraum experiments on NIF, the responsible scientist for NIF optical diagnostics from 2011 to 2013 and the responsible scientist for NIF backscatter from 2007 to 2011. His research interests include magnetized and unmagnetized HED plasma physics, laser-plasma interactions, short-pulse laser-matter interactions and the properties of solid hydrogen. He also holds a U.S. patent on the application of compressed magnetic fields to the ignition and thermonuclear burn of inertial confinement fusion targets. Moody received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was named a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013.
Michael Puso - Engineering
Michael Puso has spent nearly 20 years of his distinguished 30-year R&D career in LLNL‘s Engineering Directorate, becoming a leading researcher in the contact mechanics area. As a research engineer in mechanical engineering, Puso formulates mathematically consistent and computationally robust algorithms to model interactions of mechanical interfaces in complex assemblies. The algorithms fostered simplified meshing for complex models such as full-system NEPs, containment vessels, and infrastructure, resulting in resilient code behavior and higher quality solutions. As PI on four LDRD projects and several CRADAS, his work has led to advancements not only in contact but algorithms for time-integration, spatial-discretization and material models leading to numerous journal publications all with an eye on solving real-world problems. A valued member of LDRD‘s HPC-Simulation review committee, Puso also serves on dissertation committees at UCD, UCL, and the University of Paris. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in structural engineering from UC Davis.
Jennifer Pett-Ridge - Physical and Life Sciences
Jennifer Pett-Ridge has dedicated her scientific career to researching microbial communities, biofuels, soil biogeochemistry and carbon sequestration. Pett-Ridge joined LLNL as a postdoctoral researcher in June 2005, using isotope tracing experiments, single-cell imaging (NanoSIMS) and molecular microbial ecology to understand how carbon, nitrogen and other elements are acquired and distributed in microbes. Now a senior staff scientist, she is group leader of Environmental Isotope Systems, principal investigator of the Department of Energy “Microbes Persist” Soil Microbiome Scientific Focus Area, lead of LLNL’s Roads to Removal national CO2 removal analysis and an adjunct full professor at UC Merced; her research scope has grown to reflect rising interest in climate mitigation and carbon sequestration. Pett-Ridge was honored with the prestigious 2021 E. O. Lawrence Award. She received her B.A. and M.S. degrees from Yale University and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.
Sofia Quaglioni - Physical and Life Sciences
Sofia Quaglioni is the group leader of the Nuclear Data and Theory Group. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Trento and was a postdoc at the University of Arizona prior to joining LLNL. Her work has helped lead to the emergence of a more fundamental, unified understanding of light nuclei and their reactions, which are important to stellar astrophysics and fusion energy research. More recently, she led a joint nuclear theory and quantum hardware team in pioneering the application of quantum computing to the simulation of nuclear dynamics. Quaglioni served in numerous national panels, including the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, its Subcommittee on Quantum Information Science and, currently, its Long-Range Plan Working Group. She was the recipient of a DOE Early Career Award, has been recognized with a fellowship of the American Physical Society and was recently honored with the prestigious 2021 E. O. Lawrence Award.
Daniel Quinlan - Computing
Daniel Quinlan has built a nearly 30-year career in Department of Energy national laboratories, having joined LLNL in 1998 as a staff scientist after working at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Quinlan leads the ROSE project, an open-source compiler supporting custom analysis, source-to-source transformations, and optimization of large-scale C, C++, Ada, Jovial, Fortran, UPC, CUDA, and OpenCL scientific applications, embedded applications and binary analysis for cyber security. On track to celebrate its 30th birthday next fall, ROSE has more than 20 separate projects at the Lab spanning a range of classifications, including operational tool development and open-source research. Quinlan’s oversight of ROSE has expanded it to an $8-10 million/year project bringing in close to $70 million to date. He is especially proud of the ROSE team’s growth, now numbering 14 people. Having fostered many collaborations with laboratories and universities, Quinlan leads ROSE’s use within the Department of Defense. He received his B.A. in applied mathematics and his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Denver.
Peter Rambo - Weapons and Complex Integration
Peter Rambo joined LLNL in 1985, holding a variety of roles and responsibilities over the last 37 years in what is now the Weapons and Complex Integration directorate. Having served most recently as secondary performance program group leader since 2014, and SCAMP project leader since 2011, Rambo is a crucial asset to WCI. His research into the physics and simulation of secondary devices has been awarded several honors and awards, including five NNSA DP Awards of Excellence in 2002, 2005, 2010 and 2011 and a NNSA Certificate of Appreciation in 2006 for his work on the W80-3 LEP. Rambo earned a B.S. in physicsand an M.S. and Ph.D. in engineering applied sciencefrom the University of California, Davis.
David Steich - Engineering
David Steich joined LLNL in 1994 as an electrical engineer and has become a leading authority throughout the nuclear weapons complex with extensive knowledge of all stockpile systems. By revolutionizing the theoretical and experimental knowledge of weapon component safety from electrostatic discharge (ESD), Steich has established LLNL’s reputation as the pioneering organization in ESD assessment and response. He has advised on many high-impact NNSA and Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) assessments and provided peer review for dozens of weapons response reviews, Nuclear Explosive Safety Studies (NESS), and/or formal NESS change evaluations. Steich aids in transferring knowledge across the entire nuclear security enterprise complex by mentoring staff in computational techniques and experimental validation methods. He received his Ph.D. in computational electromagnetics (on radiating boundary conditions) from Penn State University and received the prestigious S. A. Schelkunoff Transactions Prize Paper Award for the best paper published in IEEE Antenna and wave Propagation Society (APS) in 1993.
William Stygar - Engineering
Bill Stygar is an internationally renowned expert in pulsed power who joined LLNL after an accomplished 36-year career at Sandia National Laboratories. He is well-known for commissioning the Z and refurbished-Z accelerators and associated physics platforms, advancing state-of-the-art electromagnetic modeling and developing novel pulsed-power system designs and accelerator architectures. Stygar has provided technical mentorship to numerous members of LLNL’s ASD-Scorpius, MagNIF and Phoenix project teams. He received the IEEE Erwin Marx Award in 2015 in recognition of his “contributions to the physics and technology of superpower pulsed-power accelerators, and the realization of the Z and refurbished-Z accelerators as precision scientific instruments.” He has coauthored more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals and received 12 Defense Programs Awards of Excellence (DPAEs) from the National Nuclear Security Administration. He earned an A.B-Honors degree in physics from the University of Chicago, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
William Walter - Physical and Life Sciences
After two summers at the Laboratory, William “Bill” R. Walter became a postdoc in 1991 and a staff member in 1994. His career has focused on nuclear explosion monitoring, including seismically recording underground tests in Nevada and what is now Kazakhstan. He provided technical input for two U.S. National Academies of Sciences studies, serves as a U.S. seismology expert for international treaties and leads the LLNL Geophysical Monitoring Programs. Walter has had unparalleled impact on LLNL’s ground-based nuclear detonation detection portfolios, enabling the Laboratory to deliver innovative methods, calibrationsand tools to our national security partners. He has improved capabilities by developing practical methods for regional explosion identification while helping lead several seismic experiments to record and analyze seismic sources. A past president of the Seismological Society of America, Walter received his B.A. from Middlebury College and his Ph.D. in geophysics from the Mackay School of Mines at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Carol Woodward - Computing
Carol Woodward joined LLNL’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing (CASC) in 1996 and has taken on increasingly significant roles in the decades since. She is an internationally known expert on the application of nonlinear solvers and time integration methods and a pioneer in combining Newton Krylov methods with multigrid preconditioners to improve scalability. Woodward has served as project leader, group leader and the Computation Directorate Post-Doctoral Program manager; shecurrently leads the SUNDIALS (Suite of Nonlinear and Differential/Algebraic Solvers) software package development and deployment team. She has mentored more than 35 staff, postdocs and students at LLNL and was appointed the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics representative on the International Standing Committee for Gender Equality in Science. Her peers elected her to two terms (six years) on the SIAM Council and a four-year term on the Association for Women in Math Executive Committee. She received her Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics from Rice University.
Christine Wu - Physical and Life Sciences
Christine Wu leads the ASC/PEM Multiphase Equation of State (EOS) project. As the Laboratory’s leading authority on actinide EOSs, she has been instrumental in delivering physics-based EOSs and variations for Laboratory mission-critical programswhile setting innovative research directions to advance EOS models, to build optimization/UQ tools to match data and to probe matter at extreme conditions through first-principles theory. She spearheaded the creation of the MEOS code to accelerate EOS generation and pioneered the “scientist as a designer” role to achieve closer integration with programmatic drivers. As a Laboratory veteran of 29 years and group leader in the Physics Division, Wu has been a dedicated mentor to students, postdocs and early-career staff. Currently, she serves on the review and technical support teams for NNSA’s Academic Alliances programs at MIT and UIUC. She received her Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from UCLA. Her honors include three NNSA Defense Programs Awards of Excellence and a PLS Directorate Award for Excellence in Publication.