Beth Dzenitis
Big Job Making Tiny Targets
Thanks to a unique career trajectory that ranged from designing hardware for the mighty space shuttle to managing the design and production of tiny targets for NIF laser experiments, Beth Dzenitis has learned the trick of balancing the big and the small.
As the NIF target fabrication production manager, Beth interacts on a daily basis with physicists, target designers, target engineers, and target assembly technicians. Her job largely involves coordinating people and processes, ensuring that the design and production processes for NIF experimental targets are running smoothly.
Beth majored in engineering in college originally as a step on the path to being a pilot, but after an internship with NASA, she realized that engineering, not flying, was her real passion. She returned to NASA after graduating, where she designed space shuttle components, which she remembers as “lots of fun.” After attending graduate school at MIT, she worked at Boeing/McDonnell Douglas, where she helped test and analyze configuration changes for F-18 fighter aircraft.
When she and her husband moved to California to take positions at LLNL, Beth was able to transfer her aeronautical engineering skills to a mechanical engineering role. After holding engineer and group manager positions at NIF working with line replaceable units, she moved to Target Fabrication in 2006 to focus on target production and production infrastructure. One of the reasons Beth likes working at the Laboratory is because “there are opportunities in so many areas, even just within NIF.”
As NIF conducts increasingly complex and varied ignition experiments, Target Fabrication has some challenging goals to meet. Beth explains that the group intends to ramp up production and build a stockpile of NIF targets in order to keep pace with the laser shots. She says both experience and increased capacity are necessary to reach the group’s one-a-day target goal.
Beth’s day at NIF begins with the morning safety meeting. Here, staff members discuss upcoming target assembly challenges, work in progress, and assignments. She then typically spends part of the day working with engineers, reviewing the progress on drawings and designs, and working on metrology (measurement) plan details.
Target Fabrication works closely with the experimental physicists to determine target specifications, and what target information will need to be communicated back to the physicists. As part of Beth’s schedule-management duties, she reviews and adjusts the production schedule as needed and determines which parts need ordering. She is also attempting to improve and formalize production procedures. “The designs are still maturing,” she says, and she is working every day to help make the process more robust.
The tasks in the months and years ahead, as Target Fabrication ramps up production, are daunting, but Beth is enthusiastic about her involvement: “I want to be a part of something that’s never been done before,” she says. “I want to get ignition; I want to be one of the people (who are) part of that.
“We are working on an extremely difficult thing, but we are making progress and I feel it is something important. NIF is a steppingstone towards fusion energy,” she explains. It may take a while before fusion can be used as a viable energy source, but “NIF is enabling the technology.”
