Carol Burns
Chair of the Advisory Board
Carol Burns is a
Deputy Principal Associate Director
Science, Technology, and Engineering
She has held various roles at LANL, including division leader for Chemistry, group leader for Nuclear and Radiochemistry, chemistry division deputy division leader and program manager for Advanced Concepts in Energy Technology. Carol also served as senior policy advisor in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. She was awarded the LANL Fellows Publication Prize in 2002, named a Laboratory Fellow in 2003 and named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2008. Carol holds a BS in chemistry from Rice University and a PhD in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
Roger Falcone
Roger Falcone is a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and an affiliated faculty member of Berkeley’s Energy and Resources Group and Applied Science and Technology Program. He chaired the Physics Department from 1995-2000. As of January 2018 he is a Professor of the Graduate School at Berkeley. He received his A.B. in Physics (1974) from Princeton, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (1979) from Stanford, and was a Marvin Chodorow Fellow in Applied Physics (1980-83) at Stanford. Falcone is currently President of the American Physical Society (2018), and serves in the Presidential Line for APS during 2016-19. He was the Director of the Advanced Light Source x-ray synchrotron facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab from 2006-2017. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Mim John
Dr. Miriam John is serving in various consulting and board roles since her retirement as Vice President of Sandia’s California Laboratory in Livermore, California. During her Sandia career, she worked on a wide variety of programs, including nuclear weapons, chemical, and biological defense; missile defense; solar energy; and, provided leadership for a number of the laboratory’s energy, national security, and homeland security programs. She is a member of DoD’s Defense Science Board and Vice-Chair of its Threat Reduction Advisory Committee. She was appointed a National Associate of the National Academies of Science and Engineering and is the recipient of the Navy’s Superior Public Service Award, in recognition of her chairmanship and studies for the Academies’ Naval Studies Board.
David McCallen
David McCallen currently leads the Critical Infrastructure Initiative for the Energy Geosciences Division’s Resilient Energy, Water and Infrastructure Program Domain at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Dr. McCallen is also the Associate Vice President in the UC Office of the National Laboratories.
Prior to his current positions, Dr. McCallen spent approximately 25 years in a variety of technical and managerial positions in multidisciplinary national security and energy programs at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory including Deputy Principal Associate Director for Programs in the Global Security Directorate and Director of the National Security Office.
Dr. McCallen received his Ph.D. in Structural Mechanics from the University of California at Davis, and his technical engagements are in the area of advanced computational modeling of solids and structures.
Sonia Letant
I received a Masters degree in Materials Science and a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, where I explored energy transfer mechanisms in semiconductor nano-composite structures. I then moved to the United States to conduct postdoctoral research as a Lavoisier Fellow in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California in San Diego, where I focused on new concepts and materials for gas sensing, including porous Bragg reflectors and artificial electronic noses. I joined LLNL in 2001 as a Directorate Postdoctoral Researcher and was appointed as a Staff Scientist in 2002. I became a Group Leader for the Functional Materials Group in 2006 and a Deputy Division Leader for S&T for the Chemical Sciences Division in January 2010. I was appointed as the Deputy Division Leader at large for the Chemical Sciences Division in March 2012, which became the Nuclear and Chemical Sciences Division in 2014.
My research at LLNL has focused on functional materials and methods for chemical, biological, and radiation sensing as well as on materials compatibility and aging.
John Taylor
Benn Tannenbaum