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Engineering Awards

Engineering Awards are given to recognize distinguished contributions to the Laboratory’s engineering and computing objectives.

 

Yonggang Cui, Electrical Engineer, Nonproliferation & National Security Department

Yonggang Cui

Yonggang Cui, an electrical engineer, is recognized for outstanding contributions to developing the compact gamma camera, ProxiScan.™ In this groundbreaking work, Cui benefitted from miniaturized Cadmium Zinc Telluride detectors developed for national security, and applied this technology to medical applications. Cui led most of the technical design work, including Monte-Carlo simulations, electronic system design, software development and lab testing of the system. Cui provided vital support to the sponsor in the FDA 510(k) application, pre-clinical tests and clinical trials. He effectively pushed this R&D project through prototyping to commercialization, and reinforced BNL’s leadership position in the field of compact gamma cameras.

Given the prevalence of prostate cancer in the male population, Cui’s work on early diagnosis and effective treatment of the disease may prove pivotal to the quality of life for many people.

 

Lewis Doom, Project Engineer I, Photon Sciences Directorate

Lewis Doom

NSLS-II magnets are aligned on girders with a precision of 10 microns, which improves by an order of magnitude what has been previously achieved. This constitutes a technological breakthrough. The accomplishment is due to the effort of a talented, committed and ingenious team, led by Lewis Doom. Doom carefully analyzed and optimized each step in the intricate alignment procedure, he performed the engineering of the tooling and he oversees the entire girder production and alignment process, meeting the challenge of precision aligning two girders per week.

Doom, who graduated from Vermont University with a bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1981, joined the NSLS-II project in 2007 after an engineering career in industry. He soon became the lead engineer in the design of girders and girder alignment, beam line front-ends and beam vacuum.

 

Thomas Hayes, Senior Project Engineer, Collider-Accelerator Department

Thomas Hayes

Thomas Hayes is recognized for his outstanding contribution towards the design, engineering, installation and operation of a new and innovative Low Level Radio Frequency (LLRF) platform in the Collider-Accelerator Department (C-AD), as well as for the design and engineering of the digital LLRF system originally deployed in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). He was responsible for one of the most important components of the RHIC LLRF system, the bunch-to-bucket phase detector. This detector provides the data necessary to damp phase oscillations and thus maintain a small longitudinal beam size. The new LLRF platform design uses a small number of generic building blocks that can be programmed to address the needs of the many different C-AD radio frequency systems, and allows for a low spare inventory. To date, the system is deployed in RHIC, the Electron Beam Ion Source, the Energy Recovery Linac and the RHIC Spin Tune Meter.

 

Andrew Marone, Senior Project Engineer, Superconducting Magnet Division

Andrew Marone

Andrew Marone has worked at BNL since 1987, with steadily growing responsibilities. For over two decades he has developed precision measuring systems to measure magnetic fields along the axes of superconducting magnets for particle accelerators, including the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, and others. Marone is also the inventor of the Superconducting Magnet Division’s “Direct Wind” machines, which wind coils of infinite variation by depositing superconducting wire directly onto a magnet cold bore. Coils from these machines provide compact, precise magnetic fields and have been used at RHIC, DESY in Germany, China’s Institute of High Energy Physics, KEK in Japan, and even in the heart of an anti-matter trap at CERN, Switzerland.

Recently Marone has also become responsible for the complete mechanical overhaul of the Magnet Division’s aging cryogenic refrigerator. Here the mechanical instabilities of the system previously resulted in low reliability. Marone redesigned parts of the refrigerator and supervised the repair or replacement of major components. As a result of work by Marone and others the refrigerator is now operating with efficiency and reliability.

 

Joseph Mead, Senior Research Engineer, Instrumentation Division

Joseph Mead

Joseph Mead has become a leading expert in extremely high data rate systems through his involvement in a broad range of experimental programs across several science directorates and outside institutions. Some examples are: a complex data acquisition system for high precision beam position monitors at the National Synchrotron Light Source II; an ultra-fast data acquisition system for a new neutron diffractometer at the Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation in Australia; and new readout and trigger for the ATLAS calorimeter at CERN, Switzerland. In the latter, Mead has developed groundbreaking technologies for aggregate data rates in excess of 100 Petabits (100 million Gigabits)/second. Recently, he has been called upon to lead data acquisition efforts at BNL, Harvard, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and the Laboratoire de l’Accélérateur Linéare (Paris) for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope international astrophysics project.

A common feature in many of Mead’s projects is the incorporation of both analog and digital components on a common high frequency circuit board, a daunting challenge that few peers master. His exceptional understanding and knowledge of high speed, high bandwidth electronics; his intense desire to stay at the forefront and his ability to bring out the best from his staff, represent an indispensable Laboratory asset.

 

Kevin Smith, Senior Project Engineer, Collider-Accelerator Department

Kevin Smith

Kevin Smith is being recognized for his outstanding contribution to the design, engineering, installation and operation of a new and innovative Low Level Radio Frequency (LLRF) platform in the Collider-Accelerator Department as well as for the design and engineering of the Digital LLRF system for the Spallation Neutron Source ring at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new platform is applicable to all C-AD radio frequency systems in the Electron Beam Ion Source, the Booster, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and the Energy Recovery Linac that cover a wide range of frequencies from 100 kHz through 10 GHz and power levels from a few mW to MW.

Smith is a highly respected member of the global accelerator LLRF community. He is a member of the Scientific Program Committee for the biannual International LLRF Workshop series. He has presented a number of invited talks at workshops and the Particle Accelerator Conference in March 2011, and authored or co-authored numerous conference papers throughout the years.

 
 


One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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