The College of Charleston will present a lecture by Nuclear Chemist Trish Baisden on October 25, 2012. The lecture, titled “Making a Star on Earth,” will be held in room 129 of the School of Sciences and Mathematics Building starting at 12:15 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Baisden is currently the Institutional Deputy for the National Ignition Campaign (NIC) and Deputy for National Ignition Facility Operations. She began her career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory after earning her B.S. and Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry at Florida State University and completing her post doctoral work at the University of California Berkeley under Nobel Prize winner Glenn Seaborg.
During her career at LLNL Baisden has held a number of technical management positions, including division leader for analytical sciences, deputy director of the Seaborg Institute, materials program leader for NIF, chief scientist and deputy associate director for the Chemistry and Material Sciences Directorate.
She is one of the leaders of a $4 billion dollar campaign to create fusion using the world’s largest laser assembly. A recent firing of the laser was five hundred terawatts, which is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time. The goal of the project, which is one of the largest science projects in the world, is to create conditions of temperature and pressure found in the interior of star.
