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"One Lab"

As you read in yesterday's SLAC Today, I have been asked to serve as acting director of the laboratory until the next director is on board. This is both an honor and an exciting challenge for me! The length of my term will depend on progress in the director search over the next few months. I am very hopeful that a new director for SLAC will be announced by the end of the calendar year.

If I have one motto for my time as acting director; it is "One Lab." Our scientific vision for the long-term future of the lab has to be developed as "One Lab" and that process is underway. We are embarking on an improvement initiative for the mission support activities at the lab with the help of McCallum-Turner, and we will do this as "One Lab." "One Lab" is the strategic context in which my new senior management team and I will make the tactical decisions to move SLAC forward to deliver outstanding science safely, efficiently and effectively.

To this end, as of this morning there is a new high-level organizational structure. You can read the new organization chart by clicking on the illustration in this article. We love, cherish and honor the SLAC of the past, but we are now working toward a broader scientific mission that includes the Linac Coherent Light Source and growth in the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory and Particle Astrophysics and Photon Science, in addition to High Energy Physics. We need an organization that optimally supports our broader mission. I would like to underline that this is an interim step and there will be more adjustments to come as the improvement initiative takes shape.

You will see in the new SLAC organization chart that John Cornuelle, the director of operations and chief operating officer for the last two and a half years, is not listed. There is no ideal match for John's skills as the chief operating officer in the organization moving forward. Jonathan and I want to thank John for his energetic and dedicated service to the laboratory in both his most recent role and in his previous management role in the International Linear Collider. John is considering job opportunities both at SLAC and outside the laboratory.

—Persis Drell, SLAC Today, September 11, 2007