Science Mission
From the 1950s through the present, Berkeley Lab has maintained its status as a major international center for physics research, and has also diversified its research program into almost every realm of scientific investigation. The Laboratory's 14 scientific divisions are organized within the areas of Computing Sciences, General Sciences, Energy and Environmental Sciences, Life Sciences, and Photon Sciences. Many research projects are staffed and supported by multiple divisions, with computational and engineering integrated across the biosciences, general sciences, and energy sciences. The scientific divisions include: earth sciences, genomics, life sciences, chemical sciences, environmental energy technologies, materials science, physical biosciences, computational research, accelerator and fusion research, engineering, nuclear science, nuclear medicine and physics.
Berkeley Lab has six main science thrusts: soft x-ray science for discovery, climate change and environmental sciences, matter and force in the universe, energy efficiency and sustainable energy, computational science and networking, and biological science for energy research. It was Lawrence’s belief that scientific research is best done through teams of individuals with different fields of expertise, working together. His teamwork concept is a Berkeley Lab tradition that continues today.
Additionally Berkeley Lab is host to six major National User Facilities: the Advanced Light Source, the National Center for Electron Microscopy, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, the Energy Sciences Network, the Molecular Foundry, and the Joint Genome Institute (JGI).
The Joint Genome Institute, located in Walnut Creek, California, was founded in 1997 to unite the expertise and resources in genome mapping, DNA sequencing, technology development, and information sciences pioneered at the three genome centers at Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Today the JGI's partner laboratories include Berkeley Lab, LLNL, LANL, as well as Oak Ridge (ORNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology (formerly associated with the Stanford Human Genome Center). The JGI workforce draws most heavily from Berkeley Lab and LLNL.
The laboratory also manages the Department of Energy's high speed research network, ESnet.
Berkeley Lab is the lead partner in the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), located in Emeryville, California. Other partners are the Sandia National Laboratories, the University of California (UC) campuses of Berkeley and Davis, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). JBEI’s primary scientific mission is to advance the development of the next generation of biofuels – liquid fuels derived from the solar energy stored in plant biomass. JBEI is one of three new U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Centers (BRCs).
Read more about this topic: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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