Director welcomes FY09 budget at all-hands meeting

Though funding remains tight, the FY2009 budget largely erases the monetary problems Fermilab faced in 2008 and will allow the Tevatron to continue operation at least through 2010, according to Director Pier Oddone.

Oddone said at an all-hands meeting on Friday that he hopes Fermilab can keep the Tevatron running through 2011, especially considering how well the accelerator has been operating as the world waits for the Large Hadron Collider to restart.

"No machine that can double luminosity in two years should be shut down prematurely," he said.

The FY2010 budget is not yet public, Oddone said. But he said he expected tight budgets to continue.

At the Intensity Frontier, Fermilab is moving forward with the NoVA Project, MINERvA and MicroBooNE. A proposed future Fermilab accelerator, Project X, could eventually connect to a future linear electron-positron collider or a muon collider. At the Cosmic Frontier, Fermilab experiments CDMS and COUPP search for dark matter, while Pierre Auger investigates high-energy cosmic rays. Fermilab is building the Dark Energy Camera for the Dark Energy Survey and has proposed to operate the science operations center for the Joint Dark Energy Mission.

Fermilab is also taking multiple steps to improve current operations.

A group of Fermilab engineers are developing an engineering manual to standardize engineering practices and documentation across the laboratory. The laboratory is also conducting a review of quality assurance activities in order to refine and reform standards.

In an upcoming all-hands meeting, Oddone will discuss the results of a study, conducted by an outside consultant, in which about 10 percent of employees from all parts of the laboratory gave their feedback on topics such as diversity in the workplace, management and performance evaluation.

View Fermilab Director Pier Oddone's slideshow presentation

-- Kathryn Grim

Senate confirms Holdren as new OSTP director

From AIP FYI, March 20, 2009

John Holdren was confirmed yesterday by the Senate as the new Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Holdren's confirmation was expected last month, and the delay in the Senate floor vote illustrates the unpredictability of the governing process.

The nomination was literally put on hold because of a disagreement about a change in U.S. policy on Cuba. The only relationship between Holdren's nomination and Cuban policy was the coincidence of timing: both were on the Senate's agenda at about the same time. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ), wanting to gain the attention of the Senate leadership, put a hold on the nominations of Holdren and Jane Lubchenco who had been nominated to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Other senators reportedly put holds on the nominations. These holds were lifted last week, and senators approved both nominations by voice vote yesterday without debate.

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Energy secretary serves under a microscope

From New York Times, March 22, 2009

As a physicist, Steven Chu has seen atoms suspended in a powerful laser beam and DNA stretched out in a vacuum chamber.

But in his new job as energy secretary, Dr. Chu is observing phenomena he never saw in the science laboratory.

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