Jeff Bude

Deputy Principal Associate Director for Science & Technology
Co-Program Director, Laser S&T and Systems Engineering

Jeff Bude, deputy principal associate director for Science & Technology and co-program director for Laser S&T and Systems Engineering, is a member of the NIF&PS Directorate senior management team and serves as a senior advisor on major S&T issues and initiatives related to the directorate. He also is responsible for working with NIF&PS senior managers, other Laboratory programs, the discipline directorates, and the institution to formulate a long-term vision and strategy for S&T development within NIF&PS.

Bude came to the Laboratory in 2005. He has been a group leader in the Materials Science Division of the Physical and Life Sciences Directorate and a group leader for Optics and Optical Damage S&T in the NIF&PS Directorate. In 2013, as associate program manager for S&T in the NIF&PS Optics and Material Science and Technology organization, he was responsible for the formulation, management, and execution of S&T programs focused on optical materials, laser damage, and laser-matter interaction science. He served as the acting deputy principal associate director for S&T until he was named deputy principal associate director in March 2017.

While at LLNL, Bude has made important contributions to the understanding, prevention, and mitigation of laser-induced damage in high-fluence, high-power optical materials, helping to develop enabling technologies for inertial confinement fusion and high energy density science programs. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, holds 12 U.S. patents, and has more than 160 publications in the areas of solid-state physics, optical and electronic materials and devices, laser-material interaction science, and computational physics.

He came to the Laboratory from Bell Labs, where he served as a division leader and was named a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1992 from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he studied high field transport in semiconductors.