Becoming a Physicist at a National Laboratory

In this talk I will describe my experiences during 17 years of employment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons laboratory. The stories will include how I came to work there, some of the projects on which I worked, and how my career evolved during the end of the Cold War. Recently, I have moved from Lawrence Livermore to Lawrence Berkeley Lab, another (but non-nuclear) Department of Energy Laboratory. I will reflect on the scientific challenges currently facing both laboratories and talk about the advantages of working in each environment and the advantages and disadvantages of the DOE laboratories vs. an academic environment.