The Chicago Office provides a broad range of support to the DOE site offices, including safety support, technical services, human resources, real estate services and legal staff. Along with the Oak Ridge Office, the DOE Chicago Office is one of two support hubs for the Office of Science's ten R&D labs. "The most important area that we are concentrating on is customer support, getting a better sense of the issues at each site office and trying to help solve them," said Wunderlich.

As the Chicago Office manager, Wunderlich has his work cut out for him. A year ago, the Office of Science restructured its organization. Wunderlich will now work with DOE Headquarters to manage an ongoing effort to re-engineer the site office systems--making certain DOE processes and standards are uniform. From electrical safety reviews to project management plans, Wunderlich will help determine which current systems are most effective, and which should be changed. Then he will automate each system to make them standard from lab to lab. "This process is time consuming, but worth it," he said. "Labs will have a clearer idea what DOE expects--which should make things easier on them."

And there's another, possibly bigger, challenge Wunderlich looks forward to: "Congress is talking about significant increases in funding [for the Office of Science over the next several years]," he said. "It will be our job to convince Congress that the Office of Science deserves the additional funding and we are producing the results that people expect to see."
--Siri Steiner

Their findings, published recently in the journal Physical Review Letters, help put our understanding of the universe on a more solid footing.

Associate Professor Derek Leinweber from the University of Adelaide and colleagues used a combination of supercomputing and physics to study the oddly named particle.
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