With allegations of fraud at the Los Alamos National Laboratory bringing criticism of the University of California’s management, UC Davis faculty with a stake in the labs are worried that a change in management could harm scientific collaborations built up over many years.
"It’s an unknown what it would be like if someone else took over, but it’s hard to imagine a better relationship than the current one," said Vice Chancellor for Research Barry Klein.
Klein described the relationship with the labs as a way to leverage opportunities that would not otherwise exist.
"The labs have the ability to do big science with one-of-a-kind facilities that it would be hard for a university to obtain, such as the National Ignition Facil-ity," said Klein. The Nat-ional Ignition Facility (NIF) is a multibillion dollar project for re-search in lasers, plasma physics and nuclear fusion. The Livermore lab also houses ASCI White, one of the most powerful computers in the world, and is building a successor, ASCI Purple.
"The UC campuses and the national labs have different strengths that complement each other," Klein said. "By studying at Livermore, our students can have experiences which enhance their education."
Klein and Richard Freeman, chair of the UC Davis Department of Applied Science, cited the UC Davis Cancer Center and the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology as examples of collaborations that would not have occurred without the close relationship with the Livermore lab. The two centers would between them attract over $50 million in federal grants to the Sacramento region over the next 10 years, Freeman said.
"This wouldn’t have happened without our connection to Livermore," he said.
The U.S. Department of Energy has been investigating allegations at the Los Alamos lab including mismanagement and misuse of purchase cards. The FBI also is investigating, and two Congressional committees and the General Accounting Office are reviewing management practices at Los Alamos and Livermore.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham is considering opening the management contract for the labs to competitive bidding, according to news reports. UC has managed the Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkelely National Laboratories for the Department of Energy since their inception in the 1940s and 1950’s. The contract is renewable every five years, but has never been subject to competition. The next renewal is due in 2005.
An external audit reporting in December 2002 found $4.9 million in questionable or unreconciled transactions on purchase cards at Los Alamos over nearly four years. That report and other allegations prompted the resignation of the Los Alamos lab’s director, John Browne, and deputy director Joseph Salgado. A review by UC’s own Auditor’s Office, released last week, resolved most of these transactions, leaving $200,000 of questionable transactions.
UC’s management of the labs was partly a historical accident, said Freeman, as many of the scientists who worked on the first atomic bomb at Los Alamos, such as Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, were UC faculty members.
Teller, who was the Livermore lab’s first director, founded the UC Davis Department of Applied Science in 1963 as a link between the UC campuses and the national labs. Several department faculty have 50 percent appointments at the national lab, and there are a number of Lawrence Livermore scientists with adjunct appointments at UC Davis. Department faculty have offices "outside the fence," mostly at Hertz Hall, but have labs inside. The department also has office and lab space on the Davis campus, mainly in Engineering III.
Hertz Hall is located on 10 acres of land owned by the Department of Energy but leased back to UC for a nominal fee. The university and the lab are currently building the Edward Teller Education Center on that land. The center, scheduled to open in March this year, will offer kindergarten-through-12th-grade school teachers advanced training in science and technology.
The department currently has 21 faculty and about 80 graduate students, split between the UC Davis campus and the Livermore and Berkeley labs. Research projects include areas such as laser optics, computational science, electronics and fusion energy, where faculty and students can use the lab’s unique facilities.
"The quality of science at the labs and their usefulness to the nation has been strengthened enormously by the relationship with UC," Freeman said. In contrast, the university has far fewer ties with the Sandia National Laboratory, run by Lockheed Martin, which also has campuses at Livermore and in New Mexico.
For example, the fact that the labs and UC share a common administration makes it relatively easy for university faculty and laboratory staff to move back and forth between the two, doing research at the labs or teaching on campus.
"It allows us to teach courses we would not have been able to teach otherwise," Klein said.
Apart from the Department of Applied Science, the Livermore lab is linked to UC campuses and other universities through five institutes: the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics; the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry; the Institute for Scientific Computing Research; the Institute for Laser Science and Applications; and the Materials Research Institute. A number of UC Davis faculty have joint appointments at Livermore, including professors in departments such as physics, chemistry and chemical engineering and materials science. Many Livermore researchers also have adjunct appointments at UC Davis.
UC Davis recently signed a Cooperative Agreement in Research and Education with the Los Alamos lab, Klein said. The lab and the university will together commit $315,000 a year to provide seed money for joint research projects and teaching in areas such as computer science, materials science, biology and environmental sciences.
Livermore lab spokeswoman Anne Stark said that if there were to be a change in management, they hoped that existing research collaborations would continue as long as funding was available.
"We’d certainly hope to keep the relationship with UC researchers," she said.