Distinguished Lecture: Dr. Charles McMillan 

You are cordially invited to attend the annual distinguished global security lecture by Dr. Charles McMillan, Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. This event is sponsored by the Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy as part of the Global Security Speaker Series. 

Charles F. McMillan will present “The Timeline of Technology”. The lecture will describe the power behind policy-making that is informed by technology and pose the question to future policy makers “Are we prepared for the policy needed in the 22nd century with the scientific and technical expertise we have today?”. He will provide examples of how innovations from the previous century are currently used to solve national and global security, energy and environmental issues.

Dr. McMillan became Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory and President of Los Alamos National Security, LLC in June 2011. The Laboratory is a principal contributor to the Department of Energy mission to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and use innovative science to solve national security, energy, and environmental challenges. Los Alamos has an annual operating budget of approximately $2.1 billion, roughly 10,000 employees, and a 36-square-mile site featuring some of the most specialized scientific equipment and supporting infrastructure in the world. 

Since his appointment, McMillan has guided Los Alamos to continuing high levels of mission execution during times of deteriorating federal budgets. In 2011, McMillan created a senior management council implementing Lab-wide cost controls and efficiencies. He has signed three annual letter reports to the President and Congress assessing the Los Alamos-designed weapons in the nation’s nuclear stockpile. In 2012, Los Alamos debuted novel systems that provided improvements in data-gathering for subcritical nuclear tests. 

Before becoming Laboratory Director, McMillan served as the Principal Associate Director for Weapons Programs, responsible for the science, technology, engineering, and infrastructure enabling the Laboratory to fulfill its nuclear deterrent mission. McMillan directed the research that supported the technical analysis necessary to ensure stockpile safety, security, and effectiveness. This included small-scale materials experiments through fully integrated hydrotests that provided essential modeling and simulation data necessary for validation in the absence of full-scale nuclear testing. 

McMillan has more than 30 years of scientific and leadership experience in weapons science, stockpile certification, experimental physics, and computational science. He began his career as an experimental physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1983 where he held a variety of research and management positions for two decades. 

He holds a doctorate in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics from Washington Adventist University. He has earned two DOE Awards of Excellence and holds four patents. He is a frequent speaker on the vital role of national laboratories, and the importance of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education in cultivating the talent to carry out that role in the future. 

 

 

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