Barbara Harrison, who holds the new position of PPPL equity, diversity and inclusion business partner, has made an effort to hire a more diverse staff as a talent acquisition specialist at PPPL for the past two years. Now she plans to focus on helping to make the Laboratory’s culture become more diverse and inclusive.

As the diversity and inclusion business partner, Harrison leads PPPL’s equity, diversity and inclusion strategy. She is in charge of promoting diversity through learning and development and employee resource groups, and will work with PPPL’s research staff to recruit and maintain more diverse post-doctoral staff as a pipeline to the future workforce.

Harrison has 19 years of experience as a recruiter, 10 of which have been in the human resources field. Before coming to PPPL Harrison worked as a human resources adviser for Capital Health in Trenton, New Jersey, where she managed the recruitment process for the two-campus hospital system. Her prior roles were with companies including Caliper Corporation, Laureate Pharma, Kaplan Higher Education, and New Level Partners before joining Capital Health.

Harrison graduated from Mercer County College where she was on the Dean’s list. She went on to graduate Magna Cum Laude from Rider University with a bachelor’s degree in liberal studies and a concentration in human resources in 2013.

She is particularly interested in building a mentorship program for PPPL staff. “I see this role as really being an advisor, a partner,” she said. “I’m looking forward to mentoring young folks coming to our Lab, giving underrepresented people a chance to seek careers in science they probably never would have thought about, and really teach them what we do.”

Bill Dorland, a renowned computational physicist at the University of Maryland has been named to the new position of associate laboratory director for computational science at PPPL.

He will lead PPPL’s effort to develop computational science into a new core capability that provides high-performance computing support to understand and predict fusion plasma physics, design fusion facilities, and simulate complex plasma phenomena.

Computational science is one of two new core capabilities being developed as part of PPPL Director Steve Cowley’s plan to expand PPPL’s research mission to become a multi-purpose laboratory. The other new core capability is the development of a research program focused on low temperature plasmas in microelectronics and quantum computing. “We want to organize the Lab so we can support a diversified mission and help to model what the industries of the future need to be successful,” Cowley said.

Dorland works half-time at PPPL and continues to work half-time as a professor at the University of Maryland. “Princeton is the premier national lab in fusion energy and the premier plasma physics program in the U.S., so the invitation to be part of that was very exciting,” Dorland said. “PPPL has decades of success in computational physics, science, and engineering. I’m focused on reenergizing that capability.”

Dorland earned special and highest honors from the University of Texas when he graduated in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in physics. He received a Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 1993 and a master’s degree in public affairs from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in the same year. In 2009 he won the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for his work on turbulence, the chaotic swirls and eddies in plasma that make the fusion problem especially challenging.

Dorland embraces the challenges of his PPPL role. “This is about building a really successful organization within PPPL to support the Laboratory mission,” he said.

David Graves, an internationally known chemical engineer, leads a new PPPL research enterprise that will explore plasma applications in nanotechnology for everything from semiconductor manufacturing to the next generation of super-fast quantum computers.

Graves, who last year retired as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is an expert in plasma applications in semiconductor manufacturing. He joins PPPL as the first associate laboratory director for Low-Temperature Plasma-Surface Interactions. He will lead a collaborative research effort to understand the use of plasma to fabricate computer chips and how plasma could help produce quantum computing devices over the next decade.

“This is the apex of our thrust into becoming a multipurpose lab,” said Steve Cowley, PPPL director. “Working with Princeton University, and with industry and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), we are going to make a big push to do research that will help us understand how you can manufacture at the scale of a nanometer” — a measure of a billionth of a meter.

The new initiative will draw on PPPL’s expertise in low-temperature plasmas, diagnostics, and modeling. It will work closely with plasma semiconductor equipment industries and will collaborate with Princeton University experts in various departments, including chemical and biological engineering, electrical engineering, materials science, and physics.

Graves received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Arizona and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1986. He has been a leader in the use of plasma in the semiconductor industry since the 1990s.

His leadership has included co-chairing a National Research Council workshop on database needs for plasma processing and a DOE workshop on low-temperature plasma applications. Among his honors has been appointment as the first Lam Research Distinguished Chair in Semiconductor Processing at Berkeley for 2011-2016.

“This seemed like a great opportunity,” Graves said of his PPPL position. “There’s a lot we can do at a national laboratory where there’s bigger scale, world-class colleagues, powerful computers and other world-class facilities.”