Oppenheimer: Behind the Scenes with Los Alamos National Laboratory

Alan Carr currently serves as a Program Manager and the Senior Historian for Los Alamos National Laboratory. During his tenure as a Laboratory historian, which began in 2003, Alan has produced several publications and lectures pertaining to the Manhattan Project, nuclear testing history, and the historical evolution of LANL. He has lectured for numerous professional organizations and has been featured as a guest on many local, national, and international radio and television programs. Before coming to Los Alamos, Carr completed his graduate studies at Texas Tech University.

Mark Chadwick is Chief Scientist & Chief Operating Officer for the Associate Laboratory Directorate for Weapons Physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He has worked at Los Alamos for thirty years.

Chadwick's research career is in nuclear science. He chairs the national collaboration that oversees the development of ENDF (Evaluated Neutron Data Files -- evaluation committee) — the USA's cross sections that are widely used in neutronics simulations. He has 250 publications of which over 110 are in refereed research journal papers.

Chadwick is a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and is a recipient of the DOE's E.O Lawrence Award. He also leads the Applied Nuclear Science and Engineering (ANSE) component of Los Alamos' nuclear pillars, helping coordinate lab-wide research in theory, experiment, and simulation.

Shane Fogerty is a dedicated method actor starring in the background of the critically-acclaimed film Oppenheimer. To prepare for this role, Shane earned his PhD in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Rochester in 2017 before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as a postdoc. As a staff scientist at LANL in the X Computational Physics Division, he works on large-scale scientific code simulations, further enhancing his ability to portray a scientist on screen.

Anna Llobet Megias is an experimental physicist who joined the Lab 22 years ago in the Materials Science and Technology division. She has worked at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center for nearly two decades doing small-scale experiments with neutrons and dynamic experiments with proton beams. She currently works in the Lab’s Safety and Surety group, where she helps ensure the safety of the United States’ nuclear weapons by combining small-scale experiments and numerical simulations. She also serves as the vice chair of the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, which for the past 52 years has honored Oppenheimer’s intellectual and ethical legacy through advocacy and fundraising.

Thom Mason is the President and CEO of Triad National Security, LLC (Triad) and serves as the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Prior to joining Los Alamos, Mason was the Senior Vice President for Global Laboratory Operations at Battelle Memorial Institute where he had responsibility for governance and strategy across the six National Laboratories that Battelle manages or co-manages.

Prior to joining Battelle, Mason worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for 19 years, including 10 years as the Laboratory Director. Before becoming Laboratory Director, he was Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for Neutron Sciences, ALD for the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), and Director of the Experimental Facilities Division.

Mason moved to ORNL from the University of Toronto where he was a faculty member in the Department of Physics and previously worked as a Senior Scientist at Risø National Laboratory and a Postdoc at AT&T Bell Laboratories. For the past 30 years, he has been involved in the design and construction of scientific instrumentation and facilities and the application of nuclear, computing, and materials sciences to solve important challenges in energy and national security.