Steve Pemberton

Steve Pemberton (Ph.D., 2002)

I'm working as a systems engineer at Los Alamos, trying my best to get projects, and especially the people working on them, organized and on schedule. I also support some of the diagnostics we use on experiments. This includes design and setup of the diagnostics, as well some controls design on the computer, and data reduction of results after experiments are complete. Our experiments are all explosively driven, but the work I do would apply to just about any sort of engineering project. My job involves very little of what most people would call "science"; instead I work on engineering aspects, and on building the teams that do the work for us. There are a large variety of other jobs here at Los Alamos, of course, and we have a lot of folks working on the scientific portions of the work.

For my own job search I used the job fairs and the online listings. I also sent resumes directly to companies to solicit jobs. The job I found was through lab recruitment (at a job fair), but all methods are proven to work to varying degrees of success.

My friend Russ works at GE Nuclear in their Global Nuclear Fuels (GNF) division out in North Carolina. He is also a project engineer, and tracks various metrics about the manufacturing and line processes for manufacturing the fuel rods for GE nuclear plants. A large part of his job, as I understand it, is to suggest and implement economic and engineering improvements to the systems.