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I agree with your overall point of looking in the areas around DOE labs (disclaimer: I'm at one now and worked at a different one in the past), but maybe only h
by cwal37 13y ago
I agree with your overall point of looking in the areas around DOE labs (disclaimer: I'm at one now and worked at a different one in the past), but maybe only half-ish of them are truly in nowheresville. I would say Idaho, Los Alamos, NETL, Pacific, and probably Ames definitely are; while Oak Ridge is kind of on the bubble. This might just be my bias having grown up in the Midwest.
The rest are in major metropolitan areas, or very close by, such as: Livermore, Brookhaven, Argonne, and NREL (among others).
One thing you might notice is that many of the more out-of-the-way labs are on or next to the campuses of large universities with strong technical bases that maybe you didn't know about, like Iowa State for Ames and West Virginia University for NETL.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoDon't forget Fermi National Accelerator Lab (Batavia, IL). I worked there a year (LHC CMS detector), and it was so terrible I jumped right back to the private sector with ~5 other co-workers.
- cwal37 13y agoOh I know Fermi hahaha, my hometown is literally next to Batavia (Geneva). I just wasn't listing all of the labs. It was a bit surprising to me, but each lab really seems to have a completely different overall culture set, and then it splinters even further within each group. I worked at Livermore one summer, and the differences between them and Oak Ridge (my current employer) are stark. Part of it is that these labs do a lot of local hiring, so they get shaped by regional values. Conversely, my significant other is an experimental nuclear physics PhD candidate who works at Brookhaven. Their stuff is open and international, while the labs I've worked at have very strict guards on information sharing and international collaboration.
- 001sky 13y agoWhat drives so much variation in the cultures do you recon/? More isolation type (galapagos syndrome) or is it the parent/funding culture (beauracracy etc)?
- cwal37 13y agoIt's a combination of disparate factors. Most labs were set up under different initial conditions, and their future contracts and direction spun out of their initial intention. There are specific nuclear security/safety labs (Livermore/Sandia/Los Alamos), specific fundamental research labs (Fermi/Brookhaven), and more generalist labs (Oak Ridge/Argonne). This is not to say that each lab doesn't have significant overlap. Livermore may be fundamentally a nuclear security/weapons lab, but they also morphed into a HPC and biotechnology lab, while I worked in more of their general energy research directorate, which covers everything from hydraulic fracturing and carbon sequestration, to novel enzymes for breaking down free methane. To give an exmaple, I never interacted with the people working at the National Ignition Facility, nor was I allowed in their building except on a tour (it was an awesome tour). Oak Ridge has a general Environmental Sciences Division, which ranges from genetic engineering, to ecology, to soil sampling, to water power technologies research. That's just in the single building where I work, and these are just small subsets of current missions, while labs have specialties in certain areas, such as Livermore being great for lasers, or Argonne being known for transportation research. Oak Ridge has a big campus, and it's easy to never interact with other buildings. I believe both Oak Ridge and Livermore have 7k+ employees. The labs are also managed completely differently. Livermore is technically run by a corporate board after it was restructured away from the University of California system, maybe 10 or so years ago. Lawrence Berkeley Lab I believe is still in the UC system. Oak Ridge is managed by a combination of Batelle and the University of Tennessee. I want to say Fermi and Brookhaven are managed by national physicist groups or something, although I'm not certain. And finally, of course, the overall lab culture is influenced by their hiring practices and regionality. Before I became involved in this system I had no idea they were all so different, and the really amazing breadth of projects across all the labs. Hope this helped elucidate it a bit.
- 001sky 13y agoThanks, this is really interesting.
- RK 13y agoLos Alamos is in the middle of nowhere, but Sandia is smack in the middle of a metro area of ~1M people (Albuquerque).
- cwal37 13y agoRight, sorry! I tend to forget they're not literally next to each other since they're both nuclear security labs and in the same-ish area.