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Lawrence Berkeley 

October 2023 Report

Submitted by Nancy Brown, Ex-Ls CUCRA representative

Membership: Our in-person activities continue to be limited, and not having these makes recruitment of new members and officers quite difficult. We do see the possibility of live and hybrid 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. EX-Ls appreciate the generous check from CUCRA, based on the number of EX-Ls who participated in UC Retirees Travel.

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 and we will meet in a hybrid format. 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 speaker series on Zoom. In the spring and early summer, we relied more on our retirement center (UCBRC) to provide a number of interesting talks. In August, we hosted LBNL's Andreas Scholl, the Advanced Light Source (ALS) Division Director for Science. He discussed past, present and future research using this important national research facility, located at the Laboratory. The ALS has been used to produced exciting research results for thirty years and is being upgraded. Recent accelerator physics breakthroughs now enable the production of highly focused beams of soft x-ray light that are at least 100 times brighter than those of the existing ALS. The upgraded ALS research will be used to guide the development of new advances in material science and chemical systems.

We are also exploring new types of events like Bay Cruises. One of our sister organizations, UCRAB, organized the Renegade Picnic that the EX-Ls participated

Retirement Center Interactions: UCBRC is now located in the Golden Bear Building, with meeting rooms available for retiree groups, available parking and facilities for hybrid meetings. We were all grateful for their support of the CUCRA regional meeting that UCBRC and their member organizations hosted there in August. We are grateful for the considerable support that Cary Sweeny and Camille Koue continue to provide us from the Berkeley Retirement Center. We greatly appreciate the various lectures that are presented virtually by the Center.

 

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