Lawrence Berkeley 

April 2023 Report

Submitted by Nancy Brown, Ex-Ls CUCRA representative

Membership: Our in-person activities continue to be limited by COVID, but we see some live events on the horizon. We are planning to celebrate our belated 40th Anniversary as a live event. Two key Ex-Ls leadership positions remain unfilled.

Concerns: While we are anxious to resume in-person meetings, we will try to continue Zoom talks for those not able to attend in person. It is, however, very important for the Ex-Ls to begin meeting in person to enable members to chat with people that they know and to meet others who worked at the lab. Having live events will also facilitate filling the Ex-Ls leadership positions.

Activities: The Ex-Ls continued our quarterly "luncheons and speaker series" on Zoom. Cindy Regnier, the Technical Leader for Commercial Building Systems and Executive Manager for DOE's Facility for Low Energy Experiments in Buildings gave our November talk. She described the FLEXLAB facility at LBNL. FLEXLAB is a series of experimental testbeds housed at LBNL that are focused on research development and demonstration of integrated systems and grid enabled controls. Dr. Deborah Cahn-Weiner, a Clinical Neuropsychologist, gave our Spring talk: "Recent Advances in Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)." She described the DBS technique, its availability and some illustrative case studies of how successful this approach has been for patients with Parkinson's Disease and Epilepsy.

Retirement Center Interactions: We are grateful for the considerable support that Cary Sweeny and Camille Koue provide for us from the Berkeley Retirement Center. Most recently, the UCBRC provided another knowledgeable path to escalate some of the numerous "glitches" of dealing with RASC. We greatly appreciate the various lectures that are presented virtually by the Center.

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