Date and Time
January 10, 2006
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Siegfried S. Hecker - Stanford University

Sigfried Hecker is a visiting professor at CISAC and an emeritus director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. A metallurgist, he focuses on plutonium science and nuclear weapons stockpile stewardship, while working closely with the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy on a variety of cooperative threat reduction programs. He is actively involved with the U.S. National Academies, serving on the Council of the National Academy of Engineering, as chair of the newly established Committee on Counterterrorism Challenges for Russia and the United States, and as a member of the National Academies Committee on Nuclear Nonproliferation. At CISAC, he also contributes regularly to seminars and to the popular undergraduate course, Technology and National Security, taught by William Perry and Elisabeth Paté-Cornell.

Directing Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1986 through 1997, Hecker was named Laboratory Director of the Year by the National Laboratory Consortium in 1998. He has devoted most of his career to providing technical and leadership expertise to the laboratory, beginning with summer graduate school and postdoctoral assignments there. After a three-year stint as a senior research metallurgist with the General Motors Research Laboratories, he returned to Los Alamos in 1973 as a technical staff member in the laboratory's Physical Metallurgy Group. Later he led the Science and Technology Division and chaired the Center for Materials Science before becoming director.

Among his professional distinctions, Hecker is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences; a fellow of the TMS, or Minerals, Metallurgy and Materials Society; a fellow of the American Society for Metals; an honorary member of the American Ceramics Society; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His achievements have been recognized with the American Nuclear Society's Seaborg Medal and many other awards, including the Alumni Association Gold Medal and the Undergraduate Distinguished Alumni Award from Case Western Reserve University, where he earned his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in metallurgy.