Last week I attended the inauguration of SNOLAB. This underground facility in Ontario, Canada has been used now for more than two decades, starting with the enormously successful Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. SNO was a daring experiment that borrowed several hundred tons of extremely valuable heavy water from the Canadian nuclear establishment and resulted in the most precise understanding of neutrinos from the sun. Over the years additional experiments joined SNO to take advantage of the deep underground location. In the last few years the underground facilities have been expanded with several large caverns and experiments, resulting in the world's deepest, largest clean-area laboratory.

Last week the Department of Energy announced the Early Career Award recipients for 2012, and I am pleased to congratulate our four winners: Brendan Casey, Tengming Shen, Pavel Snopok and Sam Zeller. The awards are highly competitive with only 68 awards granted out of more than 800 peer-reviewed proposals. Over the last couple of years we have encouraged our young investigators to compete for these awards. This great program encourages and rewards outstanding scientists early in their careers and gives them the flexibility to explore new directions in their research. Recipients typically receive $500,000 per year for five years to cover salary and research expenses.

Ours is mostly a team science, with credit and funding shared by many scientists working on a given program or project under strong leaders and as a result there are few avenues for young investigators to strike in new directions on their own.

The shutdown has begun, and with it comes an enormous amount of work to upgrade our accelerators and build the detectors for our new projects. Today I want to remind you to be ever vigilant regarding your safety. This applies to all work activities, but especially to the large mechanical installations such as the Main Injector and the NOvA detector, which are not routine and can lead to serious injuries if you do not pay attention.

I normally would not feel the need to call attention to this matter, trusting the strong safety culture at Fermilab. However, this year's numbers for recordable cases and for days away and restricted are the worst we have had in the last several years. Is this a sign that we are relaxing our attention to safety? These injuries were accumulated over the last several months, before the start of the shutdown, and naturally raise concerns that we are not doing enough to ensure the persistent awareness necessary for us to stay safe at all times.

Yesterday I announced to Fermilab employees a self-select voluntary separation program to bring our staffing levels into balance with funding expected for the next few years. This is not a step that I am taking lightly, and it is a last resort after we have significantly reduced spending in many other areas.

Prospects for the lab's future funding look better than they did in February, thanks to recent Congressional actions. These actions by the House and Senate restored some funding to our budget for the next fiscal year, which allows us to minimize the size of the workforce reduction. We still expect to receive an overall reduction starting Oct. 1, however, and anticipate that tight budgets will continue as the federal government continues to confront large budget deficits.

On April 27, more than 250 people gathered to inaugurate the NOvA facility near the Ash River in northern Minnesota. The facility consists of the huge far detector building, building fixtures and the impressive lifter that will position the NOvA blocks in their vertical position. When standing in the hall where the detector will be built, the building looks astonishingly large: it almost seems impossible that one day soon almost every square foot will be filled with detector.

This week we have something to celebrate: Friday's inauguration of the facilities near Ash River, Minn., where NOvA will operate starting in 2014 and continue at least through the early 2020s. The facility is ready for the construction of the detector, which will use the massive block pivoter developed and tested at Fermilab to rotate and position 200-ton detector blocks. It will be exciting to see the 15,000-ton detector in Minnesota come together over the next year in parallel with our work here at Fermilab to upgrade the accelerator complex and construct NOvA's near detector cavern. With NOvA, we have an extremely powerful program ahead of us.

Another important event taking place this week is the workshop on LBNE options taking place on April 25 and 26.

The Funding Agencies for Large Colliders meeting took place this week in Shonan Village, Japan. I presented the Fermilab program and reported on the activities of International Committee on Future Accelerators. FALC brings together representatives from the principal countries supporting particle physics. The funding agencies present this year hailed from the countries of Japan, Korea, China, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, France and Spain.

The meeting featured presentations from the various world regions and discussions of the future organization of major global projects, such as the ILC. The reports from Europe described great stability in their plans for the future, despite the European financial crisis.

When I returned from a trip to Europe some months ago, the officer stamping passports at O'Hare looked at my address, which is on the Fermilab site, and mentioned that it was too bad I would lose my home since Fermilab was shutting down. It gave me an opportunity to let him know that we are very much alive and kicking and that the Tevatron closure was not the closure of Fermilab. It was, however, a reminder that many members of the public believe that Fermilab is shutting down now that the Tevatron is no longer running. The particle physics community knows this isn't the case, but we must communicate our future plans to a broad audience.

We have started a vigorous effort to answer Office of Science Director Bill Brinkman's charge to Fermilab to find a path forward to reach the goals of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment in a phased approach.

A steering committee led by Deputy Director Young-Kee Kim, with many of the LBNE stakeholders as members, will guide the study. The steering committee will have two working groups: the physics working group, led by Mel Shochet of the University of Chicago, and the engineering/cost working group, led by Mark Reichanadter of SLAC. The steering committee will provide guidance to the working groups and will ultimately write the report for DOE. The physics working group will analyze the physics reach of the various phases and alternatives on a common basis.

I would like us to participate on an independent survey on ES&H culture. For the survey to be effective as a learning tool for our laboratory, I am encouraging everyone to participate. The survey is done by the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Department of Safety Science, funded by the Alcoa Foundation. The DOE has encouraged all its laboratories to participate.

Workplace surveys such as the one we want to participate in are designed to hear from everyone in the workforce. They empower the workforce to provide input in order to make the most robust and safe program possible. While individuals taking the survey will remain anonymous, the results of the survey (i.e. collective responses) will be used to give us a picture of where we are both at the lab as a whole and in Divisions/Sections/Centers.

Yesterday I received a letter from Office of Science Director Bill Brinkman in which he describes the DOE decision regarding the future of the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment. DOE has decided that it cannot support the LBNE project in its current form in the current budget climate. The Office of Science remains very supportive of the experiment's scientific goals, however, and has charged Fermilab with investigating options for achieving these goals that fit within the more restrictive budgets predicted in future years.

Fermilab and the LBNE project team and collaboration remain committed to achieving these goals, which have broad support from the scientific community. We will work closely with DOE and the particle physics community over the coming months to outline options for a phased approach to the long-baseline neutrino experiments as per Dr. Brinkman's request:

The High Energy Physics Advisory Panel met early last week, and several important topics were on the agenda, notably the FY13 budget request, planning for the future of our field and comparative reviews for DOE grants.

HEPAP gives advice to both DOE and NSF on the national particle physics program, and last week's meeting included reports from Office of Science Director Bill Brinkman, Jim Siegrist from the DOE Office of High Energy Physics and NSF. The DOE reports acknowledged that the three lower-priority programs in the Office of Science - nuclear physics, particle physics and fusion - are under a lot of budgetary stress. In particle physics, the stress is concentrated at Fermilab since the President's budget request limits our large international projects. DOE will report its plans to Congress on one such project, the Long-Baseline Neutrino Experiment, by the beginning of April.

I must begin on a somber note, as this week we are completing the previous reduction in force program that had not been applied to the computing sector last year due to that sector's ongoing restructuring. Involuntary separations due to budget issues are very painful and we very much regret the loss of each employee. We have no choice, however, when the budgets do not maintain our desired staffing level.

Now, to news that is much more positive for our future neutrino program. Last week, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment reported the first definitive results on the rate at which muon neutrinos convert to electron neutrinos.

We are seeking nominations for eight new members of the Employee Advisory Group. The EAG is very valuable to me and other managers at the laboratory in helping us understand the many issues related to our work environment and how to improve that environment through policy development. If you have insights, concerns and suggestions about Fermilab policies and programs that affect your workplace I encourage you to consider nominating yourself or a colleague that shares the same interest. The deadline for nominations is March 16.

The EAG is a direct pipeline from the many levels of the work environment to senior managers. The committee meets approximately once a month.

On Feb. 27, Fermilab Director Pier Oddone led an all-hands meeting to discuss the current state of the laboratory. The talk is available in the online archive. The presentation slides are also available online.

Last week I described the cuts to the laboratory budget proposed for FY13 that would make our life quite difficult if they are enacted. This week I want to focus on the positives: our program is supported in the President's Budget Request (PBR) and we are on track for an exciting near-term research program. However, the long-term program remains under pressure. With enormous emphasis placed, in this election season, on reducing the deficit and getting the country's finances in order, turbulent times are ahead and our future plans have to take into account this uncertainty. As always, we will continue to do our best to give maximum value for the support we receive.

So what's in store for our near-term program? In May our accelerator complex will shut down to complete upgrades of the Main Injector for the NOvA program. Beams will return in FY13, delivering neutrinos to the MINOS+, MINERvA and NOvA experiments.

The President's Budget Request (PBR) for fiscal year 2013 was unveiled yesterday. In this Director's Corner, I describe for you what I know at this time in the spirit that I have maintained throughout this column: to share with you the good, the bad and the ugly. I remind you that there is a long time before a FY13 budget is enacted by Congress, and in that time many things can change. In the meantime we have a lot of planning to do.

The PBR reduces funding for the DOE Office of High Energy Physics by 1.8 percent from the current level. The cuts applied to Fermilab, however, are significantly greater: about $30 million or 8 percent. This budget will be very hard to manage as we transition to our new programs.

Last week, the meetings for the International Linear Collider Steering Committee and the International Committee for Future Accelerators took place in Oxford, England. This was my first meeting as chair of ICFA, succeeding KEK Director Atsuto Suzuki. One of the principal issues discussed at both meetings was a new organization for the worldwide linear collider effort. For some time now, the world's two large linear collider efforts – the ILC Global Design Effort and CLIC, the Compact Linear Collider - have been working on common issues applicable to both colliders. As we move into the next phase in the evolution of linear colliders it is important to bring the ILC and CLIC efforts under unified leadership.

The Universities Research Association's Council of Presidents took place on Jan. 25 in Washington DC. This yearly business meeting brought together the presidents of URA institutions or their representatives. At this meeting, I presented a report on the status of Fermilab. It was an opportunity for our laboratory to present our programs and plans and generate enthusiasm and support from senior university leaders.

The Council meeting also featured presentations by and discussions with policy makers.

The LBNE collaboration is now quite a formidable enterprise with over 300 collaborators from more than 60 institutions including six national laboratories, and it is growing. The project is very ambitious with a program to reach unprecedented sensitivity and precision for addressing the neutrino mass hierarchy, CP violation in neutrino mixing, the value of the mixing parameters including precision measurement of ?13. While the primary goal of LBNE is to study neutrino oscillations it will also provide new capabilities to search for nucleon decay, observe neutrinos emitted by supernovae in our galaxy and beyond, and address other important topics in physics and astrophysics.

Last week we hosted the US-UK Workshop on Proton Accelerators for Science and Innovation. The workshop brought together scientists from the United States and the United Kingdom who are working on high-intensity proton accelerators across a variety of fronts. The meeting included not only the developers of high-intensity accelerators but also the experimental users and those involved in the applications of such accelerators beyond particle physics. At the end of the conference, John Womersly, CEO of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and I signed a letter of intent specifying the joint goals and activities of our collaboration for the next five years. We plan to have another workshop in about a year to review progress and explore additional areas of collaboration.

When the International Linear Collider's international committee selected superconducting RF technology for the ILC in 2005, one of the motivations for the decision was the potential utility of SRF technology for other fields of science and for even broader applications.

That decision has already proved beneficial in planning the next generation of facilities in the United States. Here at Fermilab, we have leveraged the investment in ILC technology to develop the skills and facilities necessary to build Project X. While the accelerating gradients to be used in Project X are lower than the ILC gradients, similar challenges exist in building very high-quality cavities with low losses.

We have a mountain of exciting work coming our way!

In accelerator operations, we need to give enough neutrinos to MINERvA to complete their low-energy run, enough anti-neutrinos to MiniBooNE to complete their run and enough neutrinos to MINOS to enable their independent neutrino velocity measurement that will follow up on last year’s OPERA results. We need to provide test beams to several technology development projects and overcome setbacks due to an aging infrastructure to deliver beam to the SeaQuest nuclear physics experiment. And we need to do all of this in the first few months of the year before a year-long shutdown starts. During the shutdown, we will modify the accelerator complex for the NOvA era and begin the campaign to double the number of protons from the Booster to deliver simultaneous beams to various experiments.