Gordon Brunton

Gordon Brunton is the NIF Director and is responsible for the stewardship of NIF as a premier high energy density experimental facility for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)’s Stockpile Stewardship Program. He manages the overall integration of capabilities critical for NIF to deliver on its important mission work and helps to build partnerships with the growing user community.

Before assuming his current role, Brunton was NIF’s deputy director for capabilities and planning, overseeing the integrated NIF budget and capability planning and execution. He worked with the NIF program, users, and the facility to define project priorities and milestones, ensuring capability development and support was aligned with long-range experimental needs and facility operations. Prior to that, Brunton led the NIF & Photon Science Control Systems section and was responsible for many recent large-scale controls developments, such as systems for the Advanced Radiographic Capability (ARC) laser system and NIF’s shot-rate improvement initiatives.

Brunton has more than 25 years of large-scale systems software engineering experience. He joined LLNL in 2004 as a consultant systems analyst to design and develop software for several of NIF’s front-end adaptive-feedback control systems, such as temporal pulse-shaping and programmable spatial-shaping. Before joining LLNL, he led numerous projects and product subsystems while at Raytheon Systems Canada for the civilian and military Canadian Automated Air Traffic System project. He has a B.S. in computer science from Heriot-Watt University, Scotland.