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or most of the physics experiments he and his students conduct, Chand Joshi stays at home—in UCLA's Department of Electrical Engineering, where he's been on the faculty since 1980. But when Joshi is thinking big, he looks to one of the three U.S. Department of Energy-funded national laboratories operated by the University of California system: the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "They have the world's most powerful lasers, as well as tremendous computational resources, which enable us to work on problems we could not otherwise do," says Joshi, who studies laser-plasma interactions. "A university could not hope to have such large and expensive facilities."
But the relationships between UCLA and the national labs are anything but one-sided. For his part, William Barletta, division director for accelerator and fusion research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, looks to the Westwood campus for very specialized resources without which Lawrence Berkeley could not function: broad-based faculty expertise; access to student researchers, many of whom go on to fill positions at one of the labs; and constant new ideas on how best to apply the labs' singularly advanced technology. Barletta puts it succinctly: "We build the Ferraris, but we need race-car drivers."
Increasingly, this marriage, both ad hoc and formal, between UCLA and its sister UC campuses and the UC-managed national labs is acknowledged to be an ideal match: the university's top academicians, offering the inherent intellectual strength of a first-rank educational institution, paired with the laboratories' state-of-the-art equipment, facilities and world-class scientists, who possess the highly specialized technical and organizational skills needed to run the labs' massive research facilities and programs.
The DOE currently funds 28 national labs, where more than 30,000 scientists and engineers conduct basic and applied research in fields ranging from energy sciences and technology to high-energy physics and superconducting materials to accelerator technologies, materials science and environmental sciences. Through the labs, DOE also maintains the safety, security and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile, once one of the labs' major focuses. But with the end of the Cold War and the signing of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the focus has shifted to environmental cleanup of the nuclear weapons complex, nonproliferation and stewardship of the nuclear stockpile, energy efficiency and conservation, and technology transfer and industrial competitiveness.
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