Jeff Bude
NIF&PS Principal Deputy Principal Associate Director; Deputy Principal Associate Director for Science & Technology; Co-Program Director, Laser Science & Systems Engineering
Jeff Bude, is the principal deputy principal associate director (PDPAD) of NIF&PS. He is also deputy principal associate director (DPAD) for Science & Technology (S&T) and co-program director of Laser Science & Systems Engineering.
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 at NIF&PS. In 2013, as associate program manager for S&T in the NIF&PS Optics and Material Science & Technology organization, he was responsible for the formulation, management, and execution of programs focused on optical materials, laser damage, and laser-matter interaction science.
He has served as the DPAD for S&T since 2017 and as co-program director for the Lasers Science & Systems Engineering group since 2018. Before assuming his current position, he also took on the additional roles of acting principal deputy PAD starting in November 2024 and as acting principal associate director starting in May 2025.
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 has also made important contributions to the Laboratory’s directed energy programs and is now leading efforts to advance next-generation high-yield facility concepts.
He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), holds 15 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 solid-state physics.
Before joining LLNL, Bude served as a division leader at Bell Labs 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.
