Applying Science
Jeff Hammond
University of Chicago
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Story by Jacob Berkowitz
Every day, while making the 15-minute drive to his summer practicum at the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in southeast Washington State, Jeff Hammond passed the Hanford Site. Formerly used to produce plutonium for America’s first nuclear weapons, the DOE’s 586-square-mile reservation now is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear waste site and home to the world’s largest environmental cleanup.
The Hanford Site threw a new light on Hammond’s summer internship. The University of Chicago doctoral student and DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellow had wanted to be a scientist since he was a kid growing up in Seattle. He was entranced by the pure intellectual intrigue of math, chemistry and theoretical physics. Later he found a love for big — really big — computers, which he could use to do chemistry without breaking lab glassware. But Hanford was the other face of science — where equations and algorithms meet the pavement.
As fate would have it, during his time at PNNL Hammond boosted the capabilities of DOE’s premier computational chemistry tool, NWChem, so that chemists, biologists, nuclear scientists and even astrophysicists can more accurately, safely and reliably model not just nuclear wastes, but new medicines and even molecules light-years away.
“In academia, you don’t have to think about the big picture all of the time — it’s there when you write the grant but day-to-day it doesn’t really matter,” Hammond says. “But the DOE has a much more applications-driven mission. At PNNL I was inundated by the importance of applications, specifically in biology and nuclear sciences. When you’re driving by tanks of nuclear waste each day that’s quite the motivation to ensure that those tanks are still solid, decades from now, when your kids drive past.”
Hammond, however, almost didn’t make it to what he describes as “the best professional experience of my life.” The job was to work on NWChem, but there was a problem: The 26-year-old Hammond wasn’t familiar with the specific physics theory required for the project. And then there was the fact that he had almost no experience with computer coding for parallel supercomputers.
“No problem,” said his adviser, Bert de Jong, a staff scientist in PNNL’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab. “You can learn.”
