A Conversation with Natalie Roe

The physical sciences are the foundation on which the Lab was built, with Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron and the consequent need for expansion from the UC Berkeley campus to accommodate ever-larger accelerators. Today, the Physical Sciences Area encompasses the Accelerator Technology and Applied Physics Division, the Engineering Division, the Nuclear Science Division, and Physics Division. Natalie Roe, who was named Associate Lab Director for the Physical Sciences Area in July 2020, shares her thoughts on what the area looks like today.

How does the Physical Sciences Area support the Lab’s mission?

The physical sciences have a long and glorious past at the Lab, including Ernest Lawrence’s invention of the cyclotron and pioneering research in many areas, from accelerators to detectors to fundamental discoveries in particle physics and cosmology. Our work has been recognized with Nobel Prizes and other prestigious awards. Physical sciences have also been the birthplace for new directions of science at the Lab: John Lawrence’s work to harness accelerators to treat tumors gave birth to health sciences research at the Lab; Art Rosenfeld, a particle physicist, broke ground in our work on energy efficiency; and Stu Loken, another particle physicist who served as division director for Information and Computing Sciences, was instrumental in bringing NERSC and ESNet from Livermore to Berkeley in 1995.

Today we continue to focus on discovery science, the science that helps us understand our universe, including dark energy, dark matter, the origin of our universe, the Higgs boson, the structure of the nucleus, the next generation of accelerators, and the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. As part of our quest to break ground in new scientific directions we also push the envelope in detectors, electronics, accelerators, and computation techniques, to name a few, which often have practical applications.

One of our primary roles as a national lab is to provide leadership for large Department of Energy-led projects, from the dark energy experiment DESI, to the LUX-ZEPLIN dark matter search, both recently completed and about to start taking data. These are multiyear projects involving hundreds of collaborators and very sensitive advanced instruments. We are also now leading the Cosmic Microwave Background Stage 4 project and the GRETA 3-D gamma-ray detector project to study nuclear interactions and decays.

What are the Physical Sciences Area’s top three or four priorities today?

The Physical Science Area and its divisions are in very good shape today; we are getting solid funding support and doing excellent science. One priority is to continue to build on this excellence in science and our technical leadership of next generation projects, while delivering data from our current projects.

We are also prioritizing the development of the next generation of scientists. We have outstanding graduate students and postdocs. This month, we’re launching a mentorship program pairing junior scientists with senior scientists. We already have almost a hundred participants in the program, which is wonderful. We’re also encouraging undergraduates to explore physics as a career, creating a pipeline that also increases the diversity of our field. I got hooked on physics myself when I was an undergrad.

Last but not least, we want to increase synergy among the divisions. We want to encourage cross-cutting work. For example, we have innovative instrumentation projects and a cross-cutting machine-learning group that involves scientists in all four divisions. We’re applying LDRD support to encourage more cross-cutting work in instrumentation and machine learning.

Who do you partner with at the Lab to be successful?

We have many important partners. On the research side, we rely extensively on engineering, as well as NERSC, ESNet, and the Computational Research Division to transport, process and analyze massive amounts of data. We partner with all the operations divisions, from public affairs to human resources, the finance office, facilities, the environment, health, and safety team, and the Directorate. It takes a village to do what we do.