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What does the university gain from collaborations with the national laboratories?
The labs provide an atmosphere not typically found on campus. The work tends to be team-oriented, cross-disciplinary, and programmatically focused. This is an environment that is extremely valuable for educating graduate students, an excellent complement to what they experience at the university. Moreover, the laboratories possess large and unique facilities that are not available at the campuses—facilities such as the Advanced Light Source at the Berkeley Lab, the Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry or the new National Ignition Facility at Livermore and the Neutron Scattering Center at Los Alamos. These are accessible to faculty and students, as are a much larger set of smaller yet unique capabilities that exist at the laboratories.
What, from the laboratory perspective, is the advantage of reaching out to the UC campuses?
A campus often has faculty with special expertise, technical or otherwise, that is not reflected precisely by the people in the laboratory. This is especially
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true given that many of the societal problems the labs are tackling today are not only technical, but also associated with issues of politics, sociology, economics and the law—issues that generally go beyond the expertise that exists in the national laboratories. In addition, university collaborations are the mechanism by which the laboratory develops ties with graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. By bringing these young people into the laboratory and helping them to develop as scientists, the labs create a pool from which to recruit.
How much collaboration exists between the campuses and the national labs today?
These relationships are remarkably widespread. Los Alamos, for example, publishes 1,400-1,500 papers in refereed journals per year, and more than half of those are in collaboration with university faculty members, many of them from the University of California. This indicates that there's a very strong desire and tendency for people at the laboratory, without any other external funding source, to go out and work with university faculty on an ad hoc basis.
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What is being done on a more formal basis to facilitate these types of relationships?
Historically, most of the collaborations between the university and the national labs have been binary—a faculty member and an individual lab staff member working on a common problem of interest. One of the changes I've seen, both when I was at Los Alamos and here at the Office of the President, is that we're trying not just to increase the number of binary interactions, but also to recognize that there are some unique features about these laboratories and the UC system that have not been tapped before. To simply invest to make a marginal increase in the total number of binary interactions doesn't seem the right way to use precious funds. What we're trying to do is develop larger, more multidisciplinary collaborations to attack grander, more complex problems—the kinds of problems where the capabilities of the university and the laboratories could be brought together and coordinated in a way that is helpful to society.
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