SLAM JUDGES

Director Kim Budil leads a workforce of nearly 8,000 employees and manages an annual operating budget of approximately $2.7 billion. As Laboratory Director she shares the responsibility, along with the directors of Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories, of providing the U.S. President, through the Secretaries of Energy and Defense, an annual assessment of the safety, security, and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, and whether confidence in the stockpile can be maintained without a nuclear test. She is strongly committed to LLNL’s tradition of scientific and technical excellence in service to the Nation.

Budil has more than three decades of experience across LLNL’s scientific and national security programs. She most recently served as the Principal Associate Director for Weapons and Complex Integration, responsible for the programs that ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the Nation’s nuclear deterrent as well as advancing the supporting science, technology, and engineering capabilities. Prior to this, she served as the Vice President for National Laboratories at the University of California Office of the President, where she led the University’s oversight and governance of LLNL, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. She served twice on special assignment in Washington, DC, including as a Senior Adviser to the Under Secretary for Science at the Department of Energy (DOE). She has served on many boards and committees and has been an active champion for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the national labs and beyond. She has M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied science/engineering from University of California, Davis where she was the recipient of a Hertz Foundation Fellowship, and a B.S. in physics from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Budil completed a certificate in national security affairs from the Bush School of Government and Public Policy at Texas A&M University. In 2019 she was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

SLAC Director Chi-Chang Kao, a noted X-ray scientist, came to SLAC in 2010 to serve as associate laboratory director for the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. He became SLAC’s fifth director in November 2012.

Previously, Kao served for five years as chairperson of the National Synchrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. He undertook major upgrades to the light source's scientific programs and experimental facilities while developing potential science programs for NSLS-II, one of the newest and most advanced synchrotron facilities in the world. His research focuses on X-ray physics, superconductivity, magnetic materials and the properties of materials under high pressure.

Kao earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1980 from National Taiwan University and a doctorate in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1988. He joined Brookhaven shortly afterward, working his way from NSLS postdoctoral research assistant to chair. Kao also served as an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University.

He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2006 and was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010 for his many contributions to resonant elastic and inelastic X-ray scattering techniques and their application to materials physics, as well as for his leadership at the NSLS.

Amber Mace is the Executive Director of the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) and is a Policy Fellow with the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy. Mace devotes her time to building new and revitalizing existing programs and organizations that are dedicated to increasing the impact and value of science-informed decision-making.

Prior to joining CCST in 2013, Mace served as Associate Director of the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and the Economy. She was appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger to serve as the executive director of the California Ocean Protection Council (OPC) and assistant secretary for coastal matters at the California Natural Resources Agency. In this role she applied her background in ocean policy and marine ecology and collaborative leadership skills to guide the state in developing policies that promote the sustainable use of California’s ocean ecosystem. Prior to that, she served in the dual roles of science advisor to the OPC and executive director of the California Ocean Science Trust, a non-profit whose mission is to provide objective, high-quality science to decision makers.

She learned firsthand about the challenges of public policy-making at the federal level as a Knauss Fellow in the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, and at the state level as a California Sea Grant state fellow at the California Natural Resources Agency. Amber was recognized as a Coastal Hero by Sunset magazine in 2011 and her California coastal research experience includes piloting a submersible with the Sustainable Seas Expedition.

She earned a bachelor of arts in geography from UC Berkeley, a doctorate in ecology from UC Davis and the Bodega Marine Laboratory, and an Executive MBA from Wharton, University of Pennsylvania.

Susan Seestrom has been Associate Laboratories Director for Advanced Science and Technology and Chief Research Officer at Sandia National Laboratories since May 2017.

Prior to coming to Sandia, Susan spent more than 30 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory, first arriving as a graduate student while pursuing her doctorate in experimental nuclear physics at the University of Minnesota. Susan subsequently joined Los Alamos as a Directors Fellow and continued as a member of the scientific staff. Her research in nuclear physics ranges from studies of nuclear structure with medium energy probes to studies of the weak interaction using neutrons.

While at Los Alamos, Susan initiated efforts to develop a source of ultra-cold neutrons (UCN). Her work culminated in a world leading UCN source at Los Alamos and the first measurement of the beta asymmetry in neutron decay using UCN. Most recently, as a Senior Fellow at Los Alamos, Susan was part of a collaboration measuring the neutron lifetime using UCN.

Susan served in a number of leadership positions at Los Alamos over 13 years. She served as Associate Laboratory Director for Experimental Physical Sciences from 2006 to 2013 and was Associate Laboratory Director for Weapons Physics from 2004 through 2006. Prior to that, she was the Physics Division Leader and the Neutron Science and Technology Deputy Group Leader.

Susan is the co-author of more than 140 referred publications. She was named Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 1994, and has been an active member of the society, serving in various capacities, including: Division of Nuclear Physics (DNP) executive committee (1993-1994); DNP nominating committee (1995-1996; chair, 1996); DNP program committee (1986-1987; 1997-1998; vice chair, 2004; chair, 2005); DNP fellowship committee (1997-1998); APS General Councilor (1996-2000); APS executive board (1998-2000); APS chair, committee on meetings (1999); APS nominating committee (2002-2004; chair, 2003); and Division of Nuclear Physics chair, chair-elect, and vice chair (2004-2007). Susan also served as the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee chair for the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (2009-2012). In November of 2020, Susan was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for her pathbreaking work in nuclear physics, especially using ultra cold neutrons, and her leadership, both in the physics community and at national laboratories.

Michael Witherell is a leading physicist with a highly distinguished career in teaching, research and managing complex organizations. He has received numerous honors and recognitions for his scientific contributions and achievements. Witherell is the former director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in northern Illinois and last held the Presidential Chair in Physics at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) where he was also vice chancellor for research. He was named director of Berkeley Lab by the UC Board of Regents in January, 2016.

Witherell first came to UCSB in 1981 as an assistant professor of physics from Princeton University. Soon after joining UCSB, he led a Fermilab experiment that collected and studied the first large sample of charmed particles observed with a silicon microstrip vertex detector. As a result of that experiment, Witherell was awarded the W. K. H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics from the American Physical Society in 1990.

In 1999 Witherell was appointed director of Fermilab, the DOE laboratory dedicated to high-energy physics. During his six years as director, Fermilab upgraded the Tevatron accelerator complex, the highest-energy collider then operating. The laboratory also completed a $150 million project to build a long-baseline neutrino facility, which sent a beam of neutrinos 450 miles underground to a detector built at the Soudan Underground Laboratory in northern Minnesota.

In 2005 Witherell rejoined the UC Santa Barbara faculty as vice chancellor for research, where he manages research administration and technology commercialization. He also supervises interdisciplinary research institutes in marine science, earth science, neuroscience, social sciences and ethnic studies, in addition to the California Nanosystems Institute and six sites of the UC Natural Reserve System.

In 2010, while continuing as UCSB vice chancellor for research, Witherell returned to conducting research on the nature of dark matter. He joined the LUX collaboration, which completed the most sensitive search for interactions of dark matter particles with normal matter.

Witherell is also part of an international research team that designed the LUX-Zeplin (LZ) project, an experiment that will be three orders of magnitude more sensitive than LUX. In 2014 the LZ project was selected as the largest next-generation dark matter experiment in the DOE’s High Energy Physics program.

Witherell is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently chairs the Board on Physics and Astronomy at the National Academies; sits on the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy at the National Academies; is a member of the American Physical Society’s Physics Policy Committee; and, serves on the Board of Directors for Science for Nature and People. Witherell is the 2004 recipient of the Department of Energy Secretary’s Gold Award.

He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1973 and his B.S. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1968.