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July 2008

This Month in Research Update:

UChicago Argonne, LLC News

Isaacs discusses strategic planning at Board of Governors meeting
Strategic planning was a key focus of the June meeting of the UChicago Argonne, LLC Board of Governors for Argonne. At the meeting Eric Isaacs, Deputy Lab Director for Programs, presented highlights of the Laboratory’s Strategic Plan and summarized his approach for ensuring its successful implementation.

Building on Argonne’s five integrated core competencies? hard x-ray sciences; leadership computing for science and engineering; advanced materials and chemical processes; sustainable energy technologies; and nuclear and high energy physics? the plan positions Argonne to lead the world in areas of fundamental science and energy security. By identifying a clear set of goals and a plan for delivering on these objectives and instituting working groups and frequent ‘town-hall’ meetings, Isaacs hopes to reinvigorate the strategic planning process at Argonne.

Isaacs told the board that a focused set of business lines that leverages Argonne’s strengths will produce world-class impact and can be engines for innovation over the next fifteen years. A sharper focus will also position Argonne for growth, leverage the Laboratory’s strengths and connections to the University of Chicago and other academic institutions, and provide an exciting and rewarding work environment for all Argonne staff.

Kenan Sahin joins Board of Governors for Argonne; Rowe approved for second term
UChicago Argonne, LLC recently named Kenan Sahin to its Board of Governors for Argonne National Laboratory and board member John W. Rowe, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Exelon, was approved to serve a second term. UChicago Argonne, LLC selects new board members from faculty, administrators and trustees of the University, as well as from other universities, national and international organizations, and from industry.

Sahin is the founder and President of TIAX LLC, a leading collaborative product and technology development company that focuses on clean energy, power, chemicals and materials. TIAX has over 50 laboratories and 200 engineers and scientists.

Sahin received his B.S. (1963) and Ph.D. (1968) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and served on the faculties of MIT, Harvard, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst until 1985. His distinguished academic career included several teaching awards and a number of U.S. and international patents.

In 1982, Sahin founded Kenan Systems with a $1,000 personal investment and no outside funding. Since then, the company has become a world leader in telecommunications software, employing nearly 1,000 people and with offices in a dozen countries. Both Kenan Systems and Sahin received numerous awards, including the Ernst & Young New England Entrepreneur of the Year in 1998.

In early 1999, Kenan Systems was acquired by Lucent Technologies and Sahin became Vice President of Software Technology at Bell Labs and President of Lucent’s Software Products Group, serving in those positions through 2000. Sahin was chosen by the World Economic Forum as one of its “40 Technology Pioneers for 2003” and received the New England Business and Technology's first “Circle of Excellence” award in 2004. In 2006, he was given the Golden Door Award by the International Institute of Boston.

Sahin has published numerous articles. Most recently he addressed the innovation backlog in articles for R&D Magazine and Technology Review. He is also a frequent speaker on the topic of successful implementation of innovations in technology. Sahin serves, or has served on, numerous non-profit boards, including those of the Council on Competitiveness (COC), MIT (for whom he is a life member), the Boston Museum of Science, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Symphony and the American Field Service. He is also on the Steering Committee of the COC’s Energy Security, Innovation & Sustainability Initiative; and on the External Advisory Board of MIT’s Energy Initiative.

Rowe is the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Exelon Corporation - one of the nation's five largest electric utilities which have 5.1 million customers and revenues of about $15 billion. Rowe has led electric utilities since 1984, consecutively serving as Chief Executive Officer of Central Maine Power Company, the New England Electric System, and Unicom Corporation (one of Exelon's predecessors). Rowe is a lawyer, and was General Counsel of Consolidated Rail Corporation and a partner in the firm of Isham, Lincoln and Beale. His business activities have been marked by his attention to balance sheet strength, earnings consistency, service reliability and environmental performance. Exelon has sponsored environmental improvement programs totaling $350 million.

University of Chicago Strategic Laboratory Leadership Program moves into second year
On May 27, twenty-five Argonne and Fermilab management employees and a University of Chicago Department of Chemistry faculty member kicked-off the second session of the University of Chicago Strategic Laboratory Leadership Program (SLLP). A non-degreed, executive education leadership program, SLLP was developed and led by the University’s Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB).

The curriculum, conducted by GSB faculty, will center on effective leadership, strategic thinking, and leading change and innovation. The class, or “cohort,” will participate in three intensive sessions scheduled for May 27-30, September 4-5, and November 13-14, 2008. As in the previous year, the curriculum includes a “test bench,” or group project, co-conceived and led by Murray Gibson, Associate Laboratory Director, Scientific User Facilities, in which the class works together in designated teams to develop a business plan of the instructors’ choosing. Participants are also given the opportunity to take a class offered by the GSB Executive Education MBA program.

GSB faculty members Harry Davis, Roger L. and Rachel M. Goetz Distinguished Service Professor of Creative Management and Faculty Director of the SLLP Program, Linda Ginzel, Clinical Professor of Managerial Psychology, and Holly Raider, Executive Education Instructor, The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, will teach the effective leadership portion of the program; Marc Knez, Clinical Professor of Strategic Management, will instruct on strategic thinking; and Joshua Klayman, Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Science, will teach leading change and innovation.

“In addition to introducing theories and best practices, another goal of the program is to apply newly gained knowledge to the lab environment. For example, participants have reported that the application of social networking within and across Laboratories has resulted in increased effectiveness and efficiency,” says Michelle Terry, Director, Operations and Education Programs, Office of the Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories. “This year, University faculty members were invited to participate in the program to further enrich this collaborative environment for the benefit of future interdisciplinary research initiatives.”

The Argonne employees selected to participate in this year’s program are:

The second cohort also includes ten employees from Fermilab and Rustem Ismagilov, Professor, Department of Chemistry, The University of Chicago.

“Feedback from the Argonne participants has been excellent,” says Geralyn Becker, Manager, Performance Development, Human Resources at Argonne. “Some of them were a bit skeptical going in, but once there, they found both the faculty and the program outstanding. They tell us they are using what they learned in their jobs and that it’s a great help in thinking through issues and approaching problems from a strategic point of view.”

"I appreciated the opportunity to interact with my colleagues from Argonne and Fermi and participate in a fantastic educational experience.” says Mark Peters, Deputy Associate Laboratory Director, Applied Science and Technology at Argonne and a member of the first cohort group. “The GSB faculty provided valuable insights and tools that I will apply to be a part of leading our laboratories into an exciting future."

Argonne scientists, employees, child honored at 2008 Awards Program
Last month 10 scientists and employees and a child of an employee were honored with awards by UChicago Argonne, LLC Board of Governors for Argonne at its 2008 Awards Program continuing a 33-year tradition begun by the University of Chicago. Robert Rosner, Argonne Director, and Larry Hill, Associate Vice President for Research and for National Laboratories, were on hand to present the awards.

Awards for Argonne employees included: Distinguished Performance Awards that recognize outstanding scientific or technical achievements, or a distinguished record of achievement of select Argonne employees; Outstanding Service Awards that are the highest honor given to Argonne employees in support positions; and the Pinnacle of Education Award that recognizes an outstanding individual’s leadership in science through the Division of Educational Programs.

Distinguished Performance Awards were awarded to Khalil Amine, Senior Materials Scientist, Group Leader, Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division; Orlando Auciello, Senior Physicist, Materials Science Division; James E. Cahalan, Senior Nuclear Engineer and Department Manager, Nuclear Engineering Division; and Stephen Gray, Senior Chemist – Theoretical Chemistry, Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division.

Amine is recognized internationally as an exceptional leader in the field of advanced lithium-ion batteries within both the research and industrial communities. Amine is a highly creative and productive materials scientist of international repute. He has been a major driving force in securing and maintaining Argonne's place as a world leader in lithium battery research and development. He is a prolific inventor and author with 100 US & Japanese patents/applications and over 100 peer reviewed publications and has achieved an extraordinary record of accomplishment and new program development.

Auciello is a world-renowned expert in plasma, ion-beam and laser-beam processing of thin-film materials. During his twelve years at Argonne National Laboratory, he has achieved a distinguished record of scientific accomplishments. Not only is he a scientific leader at Argonne, but he is also a highly creative and prolific scientist with more than 450 peer reviewed publications. Auciello has played an active role in a number of international conferences and professional organizations and holds an elective office with the Materials Research Society. More recently, he was involved in establishing a formal NSF sponsored cooperation with Latin American countries, including Argentina, his native country. He also received an R&D 100 Award and was the recipient of a 2003 Hispanic Engineering Award.

Cahalan has earned worldwide recognition as one of the most brilliant and influential researchers in the field of fast reactor safety analysis and the incorporation of passive safety in the design of fast reactor systems. He has made essential contributions over the years to reactor design and safety verification for all major reactor development and assessment projects in which Argonne has participated since the late 1970's. Cahalan is one of perhaps a handful of nuclear energy experts without whom the GNEP Advanced Burner Reactor could not be designed or licensed by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. His work has profoundly influenced the thinking on the importance and feasibility of including passive safety as an integral part of future reactors.

Gray is an internationally recognized authority on theoretical quantum reactive scattering and has published approximately 80 papers in refereed journals. In this work, he has developed a number of innovative techniques, and applied them to challenging problems that were also being addressed by leading experimental chemical physicists. Recently, Gray has become involved in theoretical nanophotonics, developing collaborations with numerous first-rate experimentalists and theorists, including researchers at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, UIUC, and Argonne. He has not only developed new theoretical methods for treating the interaction of light with these systems, but also applied these methods to ongoing experiments on the confinement and manipulation of light with metal nanoparticles and nanoholes. Gray has been at the forefront in providing the theoretical perspective on novel experiments.

Outstanding Service Awards were awarded to Maria Heinig, Administrative Specialist, Intense Pulsed Neutron Source Division; Joseph L. Midlock, Computer Scientist, APS Engineering Support Division; John E. Pearson, Engineer, Materials Science Division; and Susan Barr Strasser, Manager, User Programs, X-Ray Science Division.

Heinig is an outstanding performer who serves multiple important roles within the IPNS Division. As the IPNS user administrator, her fluency in four languages is considered particularly valuable since many users are from foreign countries. Her friendliness, competence, attitude and willingness to go the extra mile are stand-out attributes. Heinig managed and helped to create the division’s new Beam Time Allocation process. An incredibly important job, the peer review process needs to be managed efficiently, openly, and under a tight time constraint. As the IPNS divisional HR representative, Heinig efficiently provides HR services to the division and anticipates and resolves an array of personnel issues. As IPNS division office coordinator, she coordinates the schedules of most of the division management team avoiding conflicting schedules and keeping the administrative aspects of IPNS running smoothly.

Midlock is a tremendous asset to Argonne and the APS. He currently manages over 390 workstations and servers by automating the daily administrative functions through his custom scripts. He has in-depth knowledge of Unix operating and system management software. His listserver helped increase dissemination of EPICS software, which has ultimately saved DOE millions of dollars in software development costs. Since 1992 Midlock has been central to every major IT improvement at APS. He brought mainframe management techniques to the Unix world developing automation scripts for managing the Unix systems. His scripts are so efficient that he single-handedly manages most of the APS Unix servers, thus reducing our staffing needs. Midlock provides expert advice to others at Argonne and completes virtually impossible tasks through his technical skills, dedication, and hard work.

Pearson has dedicated twenty years of exceptional service to Argonne. He works in the Materials Science Division, but his impact has reached the APS, IPNS, CNM and the Electron Microscopy Center. Pearson possesses an extraordinary mix of versatility, flexibility, dedication, reliability, friendliness and team- building spirit that consistently leads to top ranking. He has designed and implemented experiments in cooperation with numerous young investigators and helped launch their careers within Argonne, and to industry and academia. Pearson’s accomplishments include: vacuum design work which significantly lowered outside bids repeatedly; electron micrographs that were featured on the cover of the MRS Bulletin; co-recipient of a DOE-BES Award for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Physics for pioneering work on magnetic films; co-invention of a novel scanning-tunneling-probe innovation that facilitates spin-polarized imaging; and many others.

Strasser has been an extraordinarily valuable member of Argonne National Laboratory for nearly 30 years. With the creation of the APS, she assumed the role of Manager of the APS Users' Office, and then took on the added responsibilities of user services for IPNS (now closed), the CNM and EMC. In addition to taking overall responsibility for the training of more than 3,800 individual users per year in ANL and APS safety procedures and for obtaining access permissions for approximately 2,500 non-US-citizen users, Strasser manages the General User and Partner User programs with more than 1,400 new proposals and 2,100 requests for beam time per year. Strasser organizes and facilitates our successful APS Scientific Advisory Committee meetings and has organized and executed highly successful Users' Meetings. The APS owes much of its outstanding record of service to users for her hard work and creative ability. Her talents are well-known beyond ANL and she is proactive in user outreach.

Each DPA and OSA winner were presented with an award and a check for $3,500.

The Pinnacle of Education Award was shared this year by Gian P. Felcher, Senior Physicist, Emeritus, Materials Science Division; and Dennis M. Mills, Deputy Director, Scientific User Facilities.

Due to the innovation and forethought of Felcher and Mills, the first Neutron and X-Ray Scattering School was held in August 1999 with 25 graduate students attending Argonne for two weeks from across the country. The school was deemed an enormous success by the Department of Energy Office of Basic Energy Sciences and the Argonne staff at the management and bench level. Based on the success in the first year, the school was asked to expand. The school attracts 2 to 3 times as many students as Argonne can accommodate and still provides a meaningful hands-on experience. Professionals and faculty not only from the U.S., but also from abroad, request to attend the school because of the quality of the experiments and the group of lecturers recruited during those initial years.

Both Felcher and Mills were presented with an award and a check for $1,750.

In addition, The University of Chicago awarded an undergraduate scholarship to Yi Ren, a graduate of Naperville Central High School, and son of Yang Ren, Physicist in the X-Ray Science Division. The scholarship will cover Ren’s first-year undergraduate tuition and will automatically renew the following three years, as long as he remains a full-time student in good academic standing.

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University Research Highlights

R&D center boosts K-12 math, science scores
A recent study shows that American students are no longer in the world’s top 10 in science by the time they reach eighth grade, and by age 15, they rank 28th globally in mathematics.

Though not widely known, the Center for Elementary Mathematics and Science Education (CEMSE) at the University of Chicago is working to reverse these trends through programs, research and partnerships designed to improve math and science instruction in Chicago-area schools and beyond. An independent center that resides within the Physical Sciences Division, CEMSE works to improve math and science education through research and evaluation, direct services with schools and school districts, and tool development. Full story.

University Research Videos

Nudge: An Overview

University of Chicago Graduate School of Business Professor Richard Thaler gives an overview of his new book: "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness." He explains what nudges are and gives a few examples of how they can be useful. View video.

Nudge: A Conversation with the Authors

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein reminisce at their favorite Hyde Park lunch spot, Noodles, where they say they did some of their best work on the book. Noodles was so important to the creative process, it even made the acknowledgments. The two talk about what each brought to the project, the origin of the elephants on the book cover, their fear of forms, and their hopes for a new political consensus in the country. View video.

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Events

Smart Museum of Art: Seeing the City: Sloan's New York
5/22/2008 - 9/14/2008. Time: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM, Smart Museum of Art, 773.702.0200

John Sloan's images of New York helped define the city in the popular imagination. Yet Sloan's vision was a subjective one, tied to his particular observations of the neighborhoods in which he lived and the individuals he encountered. In gritty depictions of urban life, Sloan celebrated the metropolis of New York by focusing on street scenes, elevated trains, public spaces, and the lives of ordinary Americans. More than a series of distinct locations, Sloan's images of New York reflect the artist's own movement through and pedestrian experience of the city. Gathering together a wealth of material in all media from 1900 to the 1930s—on loan from various public and private collections—this exhibition demonstrates the correlation between where Sloan created his art and what he depicted. "Seeing the City" maps Sloan's New York, locating precisely the sites portrayed in his work and examining the personal meaning tied to the places he chose to depict again and again. More information.

Smart Museum of Art: Idol Anxiety
4/8/2008 - 10/26/2008, 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM, Smart Museum of Art, 773.702.0200

Idols are worrisome objects. From ancient times to the present day, theological traditions have reflected on idolatry and questioned the transcendence, significance, and power of objects. Different anxieties have produced different artistic practices. This exhibition navigates a variety of theological and secular perspectives in order to explore the complex relationships between objects of worship, their makers, and their audiences. For example, in ancient Mesopotamia, a cult statue was installed in the temple only after an elaborate ritual in which artisans proclaimed not to have made the idol while presenting their hands to be symbolically chopped off. Finding such ritual denials ineffective, the Bible's second commandment—make no graven images—deemed all object worship idolatrous. Alternatively, some Christian theologians embraced representations of Christ and contended that such images were valid because Christ himself was the word made flesh. By juxtaposing Mesopotamian cult figures with Classical antiquities and Renaissance paintings, Idol Anxiety examines how objects become idols and offers insight into the sometimes uneasy relationship between people and things. More information.

Click here for Full University July-August Highlights

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University Research in the News

Science in Art 2008 Issues Call for Art
Science in Art, a juried art exhibit that features art from scientist-artists from The University of Chicago, Argonne and Fermi National Laboratories and Chicago artists whose subject is science, is accepting art submissions for the Science in Art exhibit 2008 and will accept submissions through Friday, August 22, 2008. The exhibit was developed in response to the need for educating the public about the process, challenges and benefits of science and technology. Full story.

Fermilab celebrates new funding
A celebratory mood pervaded the Ramsey Auditorium at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory on Wednesday, July 2. The giant banner hanging above the stage set the tone: “Fermilab is back! Accelerating Science for America.” Full story.

Click here to view video of all-hands meeting.

Ambitious scientific agenda triggers $20 million gift to University of Chicago
A major program to build new fields of scientific expertise and expand existing efforts at the University of Chicago has inspired a $20 million donation to the University to benefit the Physical Sciences Division from Chicago futures trader and alumnus William Eckhardt, SM '70. Full story.

Evanston Northwestern Healthcare and University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine create a new academic affiliation
Evanston Northwestern Healthcare (ENH) and the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine have agreed on an academic affiliation that will place medical students, residents and fellows from the University of Chicago Medical Center at the three ENH hospital locations in Evanston, Glenbrook and Highland Park for a portion of their educational experience. Full story.

University of Chicago doctoral candidate finds evolutionary link in flatfish
Some dusty fish fossils spotted by a sharp-eyed University of Chicago doctoral student as he rummaged through forgotten corners of museum collections in Europe have answered a question that has long vexed scientists. Full story.

Other recent University of Chicago news stories.

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