Courtesy/LANL

LANL News:

Mary Neu of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Strategic Improvement Office will reflect on the career of Darleane Hoffman during a talk noon to 1 p.m., July 16 as part of the Bradbury Science Museum Brown Bag Lecture Series.

Hoffman is a renown nuclear chemist who helped discover Seaborgium and was awarded the National Medal of Science. Neu’s talk, titled “Radiochemistry with a Purpose! Reflections on the Technical Accomplishments, Career, and Personal Attributes of Darleane Hoffman,” will focus on Hoffman’s achievements in nuclear and radiochemistry in the context of national security programs. Neu also will highlight Hoffman’s international leadership in heavy element chemistry, tenure as the first woman to lead a technical division at the Laboratory and other aspects of Hoffman’s career.

Highly sensitive separations and measurements of radionuclides have been cornerstone capabilities at the Laboratory from the era when they were essential for nuclear weapons design and diagnostics for today’s cutting-edge nuclear forensics. Hoffman’s career tracks with the development of those chemical techniques, which she applied to nuclear diagnostics, element discovery and radionuclide migration in the environment. 

As always, Brown Bag Lectures at the museum are free and open to the public. Attendees are welcome to bring a lunch to the lecture.

About the Speaker

Neu was most recently the Senior Advisor to the Principal Associate Director of the Weapons Program and is a past Associate Director for the Chemistry, Life and Environmental Sciences Directorate at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She has served as the Chief Scientist for the Office of Environmental Management, United States Department of Energy and on numerous councils and advisory groups within the Department of Energy and its national laboratories. 

She is an internationally recognized actinide chemist, with emphasis on plutonium. She has led multi-disciplinary research on actinide coordination chemistry, biological and environmental processes, environmental remediation, nuclear detection, actinide separations, and nuclear waste isolation within DOE and Department of Defense Programs. Neu is an AAAS fellow, the past Treasurer for the Inorganic Chemistry Section of the American Chemical Society and active member of several technical societies.

About the Bradbury Science Museum

The Bradbury Science Museum is open from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday and Monday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The museum is located at 15th Street and Central Avenue in downtown Los Alamos. Photos are allowed.