UC's relationship with the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratories will be the topic of a Town hall meeting organized by the UC Davis division of the Academic Senate at 3 p.m. on Thursday, April 22, in the Silo's Cabernet Room.

The federal government plans to open contracts to manage national labs, including all three run by the university, to competitive bidding for the first time. New contracts could be awarded as early as 2005.

The meeting is one of a series organized by the systemwide Academic Council Special Committee on the National Labs, leading up to an electronic poll of UC faculty to be held in early May. The committee has prepared a series of short white papers on issues such as: requirements for preparing a bid; lab employees and UC benefits; the role of private sector partners in a possible bid; the role of UC faculty in lab management; and classified research and academic freedom.

The white papers, together with previous reports on related topics, are posted online at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/committees/council/acsconl/reports.html. The Senate has also set up a Web page for faculty to post comments on the issue at http://www.mrak.ucdavis.edu/senate/ntnllabs.htm.

"Our primary goal is to inform the faculty and obtain their opinions about UC lab management," said Tu Jarvis, associate dean in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and a member of the Academic Council's special committee. "We're asking people to read the white papers and talk about whether UC should manage the laboratories," he said.

The Academic Council will advise the UC administration on the opinions of the faculty based on the outcomes of the campus meetings and the electronic poll, Jarvis said. The final decision on whether to bid for the contracts to run some or all of the laboratories will be taken by the UC Board of Regents.

If the university does proceed with bids, the process represents an opportunity to re-evaluate the relationship and think about what might be done differently, said Bruce Madewell, chair of the UC Davis division of the Academic Senate. For example, some business functions might be handed off to a private sector partner.

Congress mandated bidding

UC has run the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory since 1931, Los Alamos since 1943 and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1952. In 2003, Congress mandated that all labs whose management contracts had not been bid for over 50 years be opened to competitive bidding. The Department of Energy has not yet issued formal requests for applications, but the contracts for the Lawrence Berkeley and Los Alamos labs will likely be awarded in 2005. The timetable for the Lawrence Livermore contract has not yet been announced.

The Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos labs have a combined annual budget of $3.5 billion. UC receives an annual fee of about $30 million for managing those labs, according to the Academic Council's white papers. Those funds are spent principally on management costs and to support collaborative research between the labs and other UC campuses.

Other organizations that have expressed an interest in bidding for one or more of the labs include the University of Texas, Battelle Corporation and Lockheed Martin Corpora-tion, according to the white papers.

Davis ties to Livermore lab

UC Davis has particularly strong ties to the Livermore lab, for example through the UC Davis Cancer Center, the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology, and the Department of Applied Science.

The Cancer Center, which includes 200 faculty and scientists at UC Davis and Livermore, achieved National Cancer Institute designation in 2002, with partnership with the national lab cited as a key reason for its success. The Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology, established in 2002 with a grant from the National Science Foundation, builds on collaborations between laser scientists at the Livermore lab and physicians and researchers at the UC Davis medical school.

The university-laboratory partnership was an important factor in securing the $40 million NSF grant for the biophotonics center, said Dennis Matthews, director of the Center for Biophotonics and associate director of the Cancer Center's and Livermore's biomedical technology programs. "Institutions that can combine academic and technical expertise in a multidisciplinary setting have a distinct advantage in competing for research dollars," he said.

The Department of Applied Science has offices and labs both at Livermore and on campus, and many of its 21 faculty members have joint appointments at the national laboratory. The department's site at Livermore also houses the Edward Teller Education Center, opened in 2003, a joint effort between the university and the national laboratory to improve training in science and technology for school teachers in the San Joaquin Valley region.

There also are research and teaching collaborations between UC Davis and the Livermore lab through other campus departments in areas such as astronomy, computational science, materials science, nanotechnology and electrical engineering.

The Lawrence Berkeley lab, founded in 1931, does not conduct classified research and its close relationship with UC Berkeley means that it is highly likely UC will bid for the contract to run it, according to Madewell and the Academic Council's white papers.

The Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore laboratories were founded to design the nation's nuclear weapons, but have expanded into areas such as biology, medicine, chemistry, environmental science and energy efficiency, a trend that has accelerated since the end of the Cold War. Currently, about half the research conducted at the two labs is unclassified. The three UC-managed labs also collaborate in the Joint Genome Institute located in Walnut Creek.