Making Science: Inside Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Willy Evans admits he didn’t think his skillset was a perfect match when he applied for a mechanical technician job at Berkeley Lab. After all, this was the legendary Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, whose scientists have won 16 Nobel Prizes.

“The job description was extremely broad and ranged from everything like machining to cryo,” said Evans. “Nobody’s going to have all that.”

Eight years later, he runs the Engineering Division’s Additive Manufacturing Lab, using industrial 3D printers and lasers to fabricate the unique scientific contraptions that make prize-winning discoveries possible.

Evans grew up on a family farm, where if something needed to be fixed, they fixed it themselves. Like a lot of kids, he’d get something new and play with it awhile, take it apart to see how it worked, and then put it back together. As an adult, he designed and built tattoo needles and kite surfing gear, fixed up old cars and motorcycles, did some gunsmithing and armoring work, and worked as an aerospace CNC operator.

But Evans thinks he got the job when he pulled out his phone during his interview and showed videos of 3D printers he’d designed and fabricated. He doesn’t have an engineering degree from a prestigious university or fancy letters after his name, but now he’s a professional maker at one of the top research facilities in the world.

The right instrument

Arian Gashi is a senior scientific engineering associate at Berkeley Lab, where he runs the machine shop in the Molecular Foundry, a nanofabrication facility with highly advanced tools like focused ion beam (FIB) lithography — think of it as the world’s smallest 3D printer and CNC mill combined. Like Evans, he grew up working on his car and taking things apart, but what he really wanted to be was a musician. He enrolled in Diablo Valley College’s music program and got a job as a music arranger, which proved to be a turning point. “It was not for me — very, very clearly not for me,” said Gashi emphatically.

A family friend threw Gashi a lifeline by helping him get a job as an undergrad research assistant at the Molecular Foundry. “A lot of the job was restocking supplies and making sure equipment was OK. It was kind of the lowest position, and I still felt super-underqualified.”

To make himself more useful, Gashi enrolled in analytical chemistry at Berkeley City College. “What I realized pretty quickly was that Berkeley Lab has tons of chemists and physicists — we’re all good there. Those aren’t skills that are underrepresented in any way. But what is underrepresented is real, hands-on technical skills like machining and welding in the laboratory environment.”

Highly skilled labor

Berkeley Lab has various engineering shops and labs used to develop parts, prototypes, and instruments that are essential to scientific research. The enormous Mechanical Fabrication shop can machine any part from mega to micro scales. The Assembly Shop builds, tests, and inspects assemblies like the critical magnet modules for Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), a particle accelerator that generates beams of x-ray light used for research in physics, biology, and even photolithography techniques for future generations of computer chips.

The Microsystems Laboratory fabricates radiation detectors and integrated electronics. If you can imagine it, there’s someone at Berkeley Lab who can build it. And they’re probably tinkering on other cool projects outside of work.

Willy Evans has a lot of tools at home (too many, he concedes), including a CNC router, mill, lathe, welder, and sheet-metal equipment. He also has a family of 3D printers that he made, including a massive delta he built to win a $10 bet that a large-format 3D printer couldn’t be made without expensive tooling and machine tools (he made it using just a jigsaw and Allen wrenches).

Still, he recognizes the skills of his coworkers in Berkeley Lab’s machine shops. “I would not call myself a ‘machinist’ in front of the people I work with,” said Evans with a laugh. “I remember impossible machining jobs that no shop in the country would’ve taken on, but [they] pulled it off.”

Evans’s most complex printing project was creating a prototype of all-new magnet modules to upgrade the ALS. That took a month to print, and its sheer size required Evans to cut up the model before printing, so he could print it at scale with accurate mechanical fasteners and tolerances, to ensure everything would fit precisely.

A lot of Gashi’s work at the Molecular Foundry is right alongside the researchers and scientists. For example, recently he had to figure out how to hold silicon nitride chips for superconducting applications. Just 100nm thick, these chips were much too fragile for conventional solutions, but Gashi machined a custom chip holder within a day — problem solved.

“Our approach is to have as few barriers between the experimentalist and the people building the instrumentation” as possible, said Gashi. “That’s the beauty of being in a place like Berkeley Lab: If I have a question, I’ll go next door to ask someone, and in many cases it’ll be a leading expert on the subject. We have people from all over the world with all sorts of different backgrounds — even a community-college music kid.”

Making Junior Scientists

While everyone was sheltering in place in 2020, a group at Berkeley Lab contemplated how to help students prepare to be the next generation of dynamic contributors to the scientific world. Combining amazing facilities, world-renowned researchers, and people ready to give back, the K–12 STEM Education Program was born.

“I want students to have the opportunity to say, ‘I like this [area of science]’ or ‘actually, I don’t like this,’” said program director Faith Dukes, pictured above at Science en Acción (SeA), a free bilingual STEM camp. “Getting exposure at a younger age means they’re able to check off boxes earlier, to help them focus on what they actually find interesting.”

For K–5, there are After School Science Hour virtual presentations; for middle schoolers, a suite of after-school programs both virtual and in-person, and a Reverse Science Fair where Lab staff present exhibits (complete with tri-fold displays!) and are judged by the kids.

And for high school students, there’s the Berkeley Lab Director’s Apprenticeship Program, which provides hands-on learning as well as college and career guidance. Interested in the mysteries of quantum physics? Apply for QCaMP (Quantum, Computing, Mathematics & Physics) to get a primer on the fundamentals and solve computing problems in new ways. Best of all, many of these programs come with a stipend so students aren’t forced to forego a learning opportunity for a summer job.

All these programs are designed as introductions to science as a beginning, not a final destination. “Solving problems is about being creative,” said Dukes. “Sometimes we’re too quick to tell someone the rules of creating and not letting them explore. The world is going to change and we can’t let ourselves get stuck in one thing too early.”

Photos © The Regents of the University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory unless otherwise noted.

This article appeared in Make: Vol 93. Subscribe for more maker projects and articles!