NIF & PS People - 2016

December

Joe Kilkenny Receives FPA Leadership Award

Chris Barty Named IEEE Fellow

NIF & Photon Science Chief Technology Officer Chris Barty has been named a 2017 Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to ultrahigh intensity lasers and the advancement of x-ray and gamma-ray science. The IEEE grade of Fellow is conferred by the IEEE Board of Directors upon a person with an outstanding record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. Chris Barty IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership and is recognized by the technical community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement.

“I have always been tremendously impressed by the quality and breadth of IEEE as an organization,” Barty said. “Their endeavors and publications span many fields of importance to work at LLNL and as such I feel extremely honored to be recognized by them with this distinction.”

Barty has served as the chief scientist for the Laboratory’s Laser Science and Technology program and was the architect and the first program director of the mission-based Photon Science and Applications program. He has published more than 200 manuscripts and presented more than 200 invited talks spanning topics that include lasers, optics, materials science, medicine, chemistry, engineering and physics.

He is currently chair of the International Committee on Ultrahigh Intensity Lasers and previously was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the international optics and photonics society SPIE. He won the 2016 SPIE Harold E. Edgerton Award for his work on ultrafast lasers and laser-based x-ray and gamma-ray science.

Joe Kilkenny Receives FPA Leadership Award

The Fusion Power Associates (FPA) Board of Directors has selected NIF Scientific Diagnostic Leader Joe Kilkenny to receive a 2016 Leadership Award. The award was presented at the FPA’s 37th Annual Meeting and Symposium on “Fusion Power: An International Venture,” held this week in Washington, DC.

Joe Kilkenny

Kilkenny was cited for “the leadership provided for inertial confinement fusion for nearly four decades, including pioneering work on hydrodynamic instabilities, opacity, thermal and suprathermal electron transport, and advanced diagnostics at major laser facilities.” The FPA noted especially “the leadership (he) provided more recently of the National Diagnostics Program, whose goal is to develop instruments that may revolutionize inertial confinement fusion and high energy density plasma research.”

Kilkenny, vice president for high energy density physics at General Atomics, currently is assigned to the NIF diagnostic program as the scientific diagnostic leader. He has made major contributions to experimental inertial confinement fusion (ICF) for more than 35 years.

He was an academic at Imperial College, London, where he researched non-linear thermal transport, hydrodynamic instabilities, plasma spectroscopy and implosions. He came to LLNL in 1983 and led the ICF Program from 1995 to 2001. Experiments he led were the basis for favorable recommendations on constructing NIF. He has won the Teller Award from the American Nuclear Society, the American Physical Society (APS) Excellence in Plasma Physics Award, and the SPIE Conrady Prize. He is a Fellow of the APS.

Fusion Power Associates is a non-profit, tax-exempt research and educational foundation, providing information on the status of fusion development and other applications of plasma science and fusion research. FPA Leadership Awards have been presented since 1980 to individuals who have shown outstanding leadership qualities in accelerating the development of fusion.