Signs of the times
Small whiteboards, hung on office doors, and ubiquitous bicycle helmets are signposts for the interactive, fluid nature of current endeavors at SLAC.
The whiteboard on Phil Bucksbaum's door has a hand-drawn calendar, titled "Days I am at SLAC." Bucksbaum is the director of the new Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering (PULSE) center, a collaboration between SLAC and Stanford University. For the spring semester, he's splitting his time between the lab and campus, and the University of Michigan, where he is wrapping up his professorial teaching duties.
Down the hallway, another whiteboard proclaims its owner "on campus." This building houses faculty of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Labo-ratory, part of SLAC. Many SSRL professors hold joint faculty appointments at Stanford. If Stanford is land and SSRL water, their graduate students and postdoctoral researchers are amphibians.
The Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) is another relatively new SLAC-Stanford joint venture. Scientists frequently bicycle between office and lab space at SLAC and on the Stanford campus, building formidable leg muscles during the uphill ride. The flow between campus and lab is so frequent that individual whiteboards would not do the trick, says KIPAC administrator Martha Siegel, although group members do note their travel dates on a large whiteboard in the hall.
Their locales for the day often revolve around weekly events: KIPAC hosts Tuesday teatime talks at Stanford and a Friday coffee series at SLAC, while a seminar series alternates between the sites.
"Everyone takes their laptops and is always in email contact. It feels like the building on campus is just a different building at SLAC," Siegel says.
And soon, the ever-roving group will move to new home bases: the recently-completed Kavli building at SLAC, and a building now under construction on campus.
Heather Rock Woods
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