Wadsworth offers personal perspective on Lab's paradoxes
As a teenager in what is today the People’s Democratic Republic of
Yemen where his father, an officer in the British Army, was stationed
in 1964, Jeff Wadsworth got his first exposure to terrorism.
He was on the sideline when a bomb exploded in a soccer stadium where
the game had been scheduled to be played. The game began on an adjacent
pitch because the intended field in the stadium had been flooded by a
very rare rainstorm. In a separate incident, a grenade was tossed into
a Christmas party killing two children. The target of these attacks were
Britons. As a result, families were moved out of Aden and from there,
Wadsworth went to West Berlin and directly experienced the realities of
the ongoing Cold War.
In a recent talk to the Livermore chapter of Rotary International, Wadsworth,
deputy director for Science and Technology, briefly recounted these and
other experiences from an itinerant upbringing that shaped his perspective
and serendipitously paved the way to his eventual arrival at the Laboratory.
Born to British parents in Hamburg, Germany, Wadsworth had lived in Holland,
India, Singapore, Aden (Yemen today), West Berlin, and England by age
16. He studied at the University of Sheffield in England and came to the
United States to collaborate with Professor Oleg Sherby at Stanford University
in 1976.
Wadsworth worked at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company (now Lockheed
Martin) from 1980 until he came to the Laboratory in 1992.
Under the title "A Personal Perspective on the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory From Inside and Out," Wadsworth discussed his
views of the Laboratory and the "special challenges" it faces,
not the least of which is reconciling seemingly-contradictory elements.
"Livermore Lab is a small city within a city. It has all the complexities
of not only being somewhat like industry, but it has this unique university
component as well — we all work for the University of California,"
he said. "We’re hopelessly open (our salaries and rankings are
published), yet we do classified work, and we have this tight security.
We experience a bunch of paradoxes, things that are seemingly at odds."
Wadsworth went on to describe the "seven paradoxes of Livermore Lab."
Example one: Security concerns have never been as high as they are now,
yet the Laboratory "needs to hire foreign nationals" to fulfill
its missions.
"We need to hire foreign nationals to do our work," Wadsworth
said. "From a world perspective, most of the work done in science
is done outside the United States. Over 50 percent of the people graduating
from American universities in fields of interest to our work at the Laboratory
— for example, chemistry, physics, computing, biology, and engineering
— are not citizens of the United States."
Many foreign nationals will likely become American citizens and go on
to work in industry, teach in American universities, or work in national
labs "as I did," he said. "But if you alienate foreign
nationals by saying ‘we’re not interested in you now,’
not only are you cutting out 50 percent of the people available to do
the work, you’re ticking them off and hurting future prospects for
recruiting their own students or working with them in industry or in Laboratory
interactions."
Over the last three years, on average about two-thirds of the 400 graduate
students who applied for four openings in LLNL’s Lawrence Livermore
Post-Doc Fellowship program were foreign nationals.
Hiring and working in partnership with the best qualified researchers,
including foreign nationals, is critical to the continued success of cutting-edge
research programs such as the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative,
or ASCI, which relies on a wide range of academic collaborations across
the country, bringing together the best people in the field, Wadsworth
said.
"That’s how you execute large programs. They are not done in
confinement, but by bringing in the best people in the country,"
he said, noting that the "multidisciplinary team science" pioneered
by Ernest Lawrence remains a hallmark of the Laboratory.
Another paradox is reconciling the Lab’s "one size fits all"
reward and work life system with four generations of employees, each with
different values, Wadsworth said. Generation Xers are less interested
in retirement benefits and job security, traditionally valued by longtime
employees, and more interested in flexible schedules, telecommuting and
bonuses, for example. "You have this orthogonality. The values upon
which the Laboratory was created, are not necessarily the values of the
people coming into the Lab today."
Other paradoxes included:
• Congressional, DOE, and UC oversight of the national labs is at
an all time high, but there’s pressure to cut bureaucracy. "We
have more oversight and more review committees than ever that tell us
how to do business," Wadsworth observed. "Back when the labs
were formed, the government owned the mission and the contractor decided
how to execute it. The government decided ‘what’ and the Lab
decided ‘how.’ The ‘what’ and the ‘how’
have become confused in my opinion. We need to understand and clarify
roles and responsibilities better."
• The nature of science and discovery is "unpredictable and
non-linear," but scientific breakthroughs are asked for "on
schedule." Wadsworth said it’s important to realize that breakthroughs
are typically 10 to 20 years in the making and are the "outcome"
of a process that is by its very nature unpredictable.
• There is less flexibility to invest in science, although the Laboratory
Directed Research and Development (LDRD) is very valuable and yet it is
high risk research projects made possible by flexibility of this kind
that have yielded "terrific breakthroughs."
"You have to have flexibility to invest in science in large labs,"
Wadsworth said. "You need the flexibility to apply expertise developed
in one area to other areas of science."
• Completing projects on cost and schedule is an imperative, but
major DOE projects are funded "year-to-year" with "available"
funds, and inflation factors are inconsistently applied. "The system
we have doesn’t pay for everything up front," he said. "When
you buy an aircraft carrier, the money is put in an account for completion
of the entire carrier. If you do a science project you don’t have
everything up front."
Nonetheless, the National Ignition Facility and ASCI, "two of the
most exciting science projects in the country are on target," he
said.
• Invention and the commercial impact of Lab developed-technologies
is desirable, though the success of commercial partnerships have been
"problematical," according to Wadsworth. "There’s
a lot of technology at the Lab and we like to get it out."
The competitors of companies that work with the Lab through cooperative
research and development agreements often complain about public funds
being used to bring technologies to fruition. "If you fail, everything’s
OK," Wadsworth joked. "But if you succeed, you face some interesting
issues."
"We’ve run into problems with a lot of our successes,"
he said, citing Micro Impulse Radar, EUVL, and Peregrine as technologies
that had to overcome hurdles on the way to commercialization.
In prefacing his talk, Wadsworth recalled how, as a student of metallurgy
at the University of Sheffield, he had taken a great interest in research
being conducted in the United States and in California in particular.
"It’s where a lot of the most advanced, exciting work was being
done," he said. "At that time I sent for a paper reprint from
Livermore Lab. That was the first time I saw this name ‘Lawrence
Livermore’ and I remember thinking ‘gee, that’s really
interesting, I wonder what Livermore is like and what that Lab’s
like?"