Strategic Deterrence Academic Collaboration Team grants four awards to support collaborative research

Four teams at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) were recently granted awards through the Lab’s Fiscal Year 2025 Academic Collaboration Team (ACT) annual call for proposals. Awards support university research partners for up to three years to perform research in collaboration with Lab scientists and offer an important way to build long-term connections with universities and bring game-changing science and innovation to Lab programs.  

Now in their sixth year, ACT university collaboration awards were created to encourage and advance strategic partnerships among universities with a focus on the Lab’s and Strategic Deterrence’s missions. This year’s awards are supported by the Weapons Physics Design program.

This year’s call was the most competitive on record, with 35 proposals received. A program-nominated expert committee reviews all proposals, with the first round of reviews occurring on proposals that have been redacted of the university and principal investigator (PI) names. The final round of reviews includes presentations from the Lab PI, during which the committee can ask questions to understand how the proposed project will help to establish long-term relations with universities to respond with agility to Lab program challenges.

“A unique aspect of the ACT review process is that proposals need to do more than just pitch impactful science,” said ACT chair Alison Saunders. “ACT proposals are also reviewed on the quality of the collaboration, as ACT aims to support work that leverages both university and Lab expertise to accomplish science that neither party could easily do on its own.”

While all proposals received this year were of excellent quality, the final selections stood out for their potential to bring innovative science and ideas to the programs they support, Saunders said.

This year’s winning projects span a wide variety of Lab-relevant science, including building new line shape models for improved opacity modeling, machine learning and advanced statistical analysis in support of material model development, novel experimental capabilities to turbulence in fusion experiments, and improved neutron-capture cross section measurements.

This year’s recipients include Paul Grabowski, Kevin Quinlan and Laura Wendelberger, Ye Zhou, and Adriana Sweet.

The committee includes Brody Bassett, Jamie Bramwell, Jeremy Lenhardt, Alastair Moore, Fady Najjar, Brad Perfect, Jo Ressler, Scott Sepke and Trevor Willey. The ACT is chaired by Alison Saunders and administered by Malu Mageo and supports all Strategic Deterrence academic subcontract activity.

Fiscal Year 2025 awards
Award recipients, project titles and LLNL and university principal investigators are as follows:

Illinois State University and University of Colorado Boulder
“New Molecular Dynamics for Calculating Line Shapes: A Multiscale Plasma Model”
Paul Grabowski, LLNL principal investigator
Matt Caplan, Illinois State principal investigator
Thomas Gomez, CU Boulder principal investigator

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
“Dimension Reduction with Deep Gaussian Process Models”
Laura Wendelberger, LLNL co-principal investigator
Kevin Quinlan, LLNL co-principal investigator
Annie Booth, Virginia Tech principal investigator

Georgia Institute of Technology
“Effect of grid generated turbulence and initial conditions on Rayleigh-Taylor driven mixing”
Ye Zhou, LLNL principal investigator
Devesh Ranjan, Georgia Tech principal investigator

University of California Berkeley
“Uncertainty quantification of the beta-Oslo method for nuclei far from stability”
Adriana Sweet, LLNL principal investigator
Bethany Goldblum, UCB principal investigator

The next ACT call for proposals is expected to arrive in early summer and will be a draw for scientists around LLNL. For any questions about the academic collaboration team, contact the ACT chair Alison Saunders.