The Director's S&T Awards Program was first implemented in 2000 to acknowledge, celebrate and reward recent significant scientific and technical accomplishments by Laboratory staff and collaborators. Accomplishments honored by this award are those that have made a significant impact on the Laboratory's mission and have been widely acknowledged both within the Laboratory and externally by sponsors and stakeholders as a significant advancement.
This year’s winners are:
Cross Directorate Advanced Technology Development for DOD Sponsor
Wayne Abreu, River Aden, Graham Allen, Luis Alvarez, S. Mark Ammons, Saroja Ammula, Jay Ayers, Wendy Balanon, Robert Beard, Anumeha Bhasker, Matt Boisselle, Derek Brangham, Bob Burr, Ashley Businger, Terri Businger, Joel Campos, Emily Carr, Adriana Castillo, Erin Clark, Chris Clouser, Simon Cohen, Ethan Copitch, Kurt Cutter, Brock Davis, Robert Deri, Tony Donaville, David Dutra, Rebecca Dylla-Spears, Al Erlandson, William Fenwick, Amanda Fisher, Steve Fulkerson, Cesar Garcia, David Gibson, Laina Gilmore, Gayatri Gururangan, Brian Hackel, Colin Harthcock, John Heebner, Brian Heidl, Carrie Holden, Doug Homoelle, Eric Huffman, Sheldon Kaho'onei, Julian Larregui, Cindy Larson, Stephen Le, Jiang Li, Jeremy Lusk, Christopher Mah, Kimberly Manuel, Chris Marshall, Dan Mason, Jeffrey Mccann, Jacob McCormack, Robert McDonald, Dwayne Merrill, Phil Miller, James Mitchell, Fran Morrissey, Douglas Moscardini, Emily Moulton, Karun Nagarajan, Brian Nagayama, Jeffrey Nelson, George Nowak, Taylor Olsen, Thomas Orduna, Paul Pax, Aaron Peer, Andrew Perazzo, Brenda Perry, Steven Peterman, David Pope, Charles Purcell, Brett Raymond, Allen Riddle, Paul Rocha, Roberto Rodriguez, Paul Rosso, Connie Ruvalcaba-Olson, Kathleen Schaffers, Daveon Shortridge, Lawrence Siegel, Ron Sigurdsson, Tara Silva, Nicholas St. Hilaire, Pete Supsinskas, Michael Taranowski, Steve Telford, Amy Trenchak, Ramesh Vadlamani, Vinh Van, Michael Varney, Anthony Vella, Rafael Villanueva, Evan Wandrocke, Wanda Wang, Timothy Wichert, Alice Wong and Sheldon Wu
This project delivered a hardware system with orders of magnitude improvement over prior systems, meeting all milestones on time throughout an aggressive schedule. The multidisciplinary and cross-directorate project team solved numerous engineering and science challenges that many outside experts did not believe to be possible. This technology will be a key part of future DOD architectures delivering unprecedented capability to the warfighter.
Lanmodulin-Based Rare Earth Purification (LanPure)
Gauthier Deblonde, Patrick Diep, Ziye Dong, Yongqin Jiao, Dan Park and Jeremy Seidel
By leveraging the natural selectivity of lanmodulin proteins and engineered protein homologs, the LLNL team created a first-in-class biomolecular separation platform that has the potential to provide an effective and sustainable means for industrial rare-earth-element purification. LanPure demonstrates how LLNL’s multidisciplinary strengths — spanning synthetic biology, computation and engineering — can be harnessed to solve pressing national challenges and have lasting implications for the development of resilient supply chains for materials essential to energy security and defense.
Revolutionizing Cancer Treatment through Supercomputing-Aided Drug Discovery
Semiha Kevser Bali, Felice Lightstone, Jun Pei and Sergio Wong
An LLNL research team has set a new benchmark for operational excellence and mission impact through its pioneering partnership with BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics and the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research. This collaboration resulted in the rapid discovery and advancement of BBO-8520, a first-in-class drug candidate targeting KRAS mutations — implicated in nearly 30% of all cancers. Leveraging LLNL’s world-class high-performance computing resources and the Livermore Computer-Aided Drug Discovery platform, the team integrated artificial intelligence and physics-based modeling to streamline and accelerate the drug-discovery process.
Revolutionizing High-Pressure Material Science: The Flexible Imaging Diffraction Diagnostic for Laser Experiments (FIDDLE)
Robin Benedetti, Neal Bhandarkar, Dave Bradley, Charles Brown, Kelly Burns, Arthur Carpenter, Peter Celliers, Nicholas Durst, Jon Eggert, Glenn Grant, Mike Hardy, Chuck Heinbockel, Justin Kehl, Brandon Morioka, Sabrina Nagel, Peter Nyholm, Nathan Palmer, Guy Ruchonnet, Timothy Sarginson, Andrew Sharp, Saransh Soderlind and Cara Vennari
FIDDLE represents a transformative leap forward in high-pressure material science, delivering unprecedented capabilities for nanosecond-scale resolution of phase transitions during laser-driven compression experiments on the National Ignition Facility. This innovative diagnostic platform addresses longstanding challenges in high-resolution diffraction measurements, offering unparalleled precision and clarity in capturing dynamic material behavior under extreme conditions.
SEQUOIA HARBINGER Team
Ed Seidl and David Youd
The SEQUOIA HARBINGER project team in the Z/IOA Program produced research results in data-encoding methods that enabled the sponsor to implement dramatic savings in storage space for mission data retrieval systems.
Award nomination material has been edited and condensed.