Barbara Carreras

As the Laboratory’s Budget Officer, Barbara Jean “BJ” Carreras oversees Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Business Development and Analysis Office. She is responsible for a broad range of business and financial activities, including recommending, planning, and implementing financial policies, funding and cost control, financial reporting, and oversight of the Lab’s annual budget. She is also responsible for the partnerships and sponsored research activities that provide ways for non-federal entities to access scientific and technical expertise available at Brookhaven Lab and help advance the Laboratory’s own research goals and interests that are consistent with or complimentary to the missions of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and the Lab.

Carreras began her career at Brookhaven Lab through the “youth on campus” program in 1976, which was aimed at developing talent and providing experience for the Lab’s future workforce. After earning a bachelor’s degree in business in 1983 from Dowling College, she continued her career at the Lab as an administrative specialist and later as a budget specialist working in the applied sciences and nuclear energy business office. She left the Lab when she started a family in 1985 and returned in 1993.  

While working at the Lab she earned an M.B.A. in 2002, also from Dowling College. She moved through the ranks at the Lab to be become a business operations manager in 2005, responsible for budgeting, administration, reporting, and financial management for an operating budget of $80 million, supporting four scientific research departments, before her 2012 appointment as Budget Officer.