Big Ideas Lab
What happens when you bring a group of fifth graders into one of the world’s most advanced science labs? It’s not just magic—it’s mission-critical.
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Explore opportunities at llnl.gov/careers, where your next career move could make history.
When you're a kid, the world feels infinite, full of questions you don't even know how to ask yet. How does a light bulb glow? What makes a rainbow curve across the sky? Why do stars only come out at night? There's so much to learn. Every question is an adventure. Every answer, a discovery. For Edward Teller, growing up at the end of World War I, that curiosity extended to places most adults wouldn't give a second thought. On a visit to his father's law office, a room filled with papers, books, and the quiet
shuffle of daily work, he didn't see this as boring or mundane. He saw it as a chance to explore.
I also remember my father's office. The really interesting things in there were two typewriters.
That was the first complicated machinery that attracted me. And that attraction was of course met by a strict denial. I shouldn't touch them.
How many times has a child's natural wonder been brushed aside? And what worlds of possibility slip away when we tell them not to explore?
It was actually our co-founder Edward Teller, who had a passion for science and education, who brought the initial education outreach component to the laboratory.
Edward Teller's fascination with complex machinery extended far beyond typewriters. He earned degrees in chemical engineering and a PhD in physics. He went on to co-found Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and established himself as a pioneer of the nuclear age. His work not only transformed physics, but also inspired generations of young scientists to pursue careers in scientific research. Today, that same spirit of curiosity thrives at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. They believe the next big ideas in science could be sitting in the fifth grade classroom right now. And they're on a mission to find them.
Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your weekly exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow today.
Looking for a career that challenges and inspires? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a power grid dynamics engineer and a transmission grid engineer, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering, and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to growth. groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission-driven environment. Discover open positions at llnl.gov/careers, where big ideas come to life.
In addition to being one of the nation's top research institutions, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is dedicated to fostering a love of science in America's youth.
The lab has been doing outreach in different ways for most of its history. We have a picture in the Discovery Center of science outreach with students back to 1968 from our archivist collection.
Joanna Albala is the Science Education Program Manager at the lab. She oversees both onsite and external outreach events for students in kindergarten through high school, providing opportunities for students to tour the lab and participate in hands-on activities.
There have been many studies about how important it is to engage students early into STEM and pique their curiosity when they're at ages, when they're most curious, when they're young and they don't have any distraction, just the moment to be engaged in.
Early education in STEM, which stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, can promote critical thinking skills, improve self-confidence, and aid in problem-solving. Sounds like a good idea if you ask a teacher or a parent. But what if you are a fifth grader?
Imagine it for a moment. Maybe science class is right after lunch recess. You had two piping hot pieces of pepperoni pizza from the cafeteria, washed it down with ice cold chocolate milk, ran outside to play a game of soccer with your friends. Then, the dreaded recess bell. Now, you're in a hot classroom. Belly full, muscles aching, you're tired, sleepy. Your teacher flips on an overhead projector, launching into a lesson about someone named Newton, trying to make orbits sound exciting. Meanwhile, the fluorescent lights overhead are humming, and your eyes are drifting shut.
This is the most dull part of your day. So when faced with the prospect of a field trip on these same topics, students don't often expect much. As Patrick Poole, an experimental physicist at the lab, knows well.
They drive on a school bus, they get here to the lab, they're, "Oh my gosh, it's a government laboratory. What am I gonna see? This is gonna be boring."
But when they file off the bus, notebooks in hand, their first steps into the lab prove them wrong.
We walk them in through the Discovery Center. It's bright colors and flashing things, and it really feels like a fun, interactive museum. And it's got this big dome in the middle that we'll learn shortly is where our experiments happen.
And that's when the switch flips.
It clicks to them that, "Wait a minute, this is gonna be fun."
The Discovery Center serves as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's museum and visitor center. It's a playground for the mind. And serving as their guide is a passionate scientist doing real experiments.
But you can see the light turning on where I can ask this person anything that I want, and they're gonna know the answer.
We all come in contact with nurses and doctors, but how often do you have an astrophysicist come into your world?
It is frequent that we're behind schedule because the students just keep wanna talk to us. They don't wanna go play with all the cool toys, they wanna ask, "How does a black hole form?"
Many questions center on the National Ignition Facility, where the lab uses high-powered lasers to simulate the energy created in the core of the sun. It sounds like something straight out of science fiction. And the kids think so, too.
My favorite question I got was, how many NIF shots do you have to be next to before you turn into the Hulk? And so I have to draw on my old knowledge of the gamma radiation that formed the Hulk in the comics and try to say, well, OK, here's how many shots. But please don't do that. It's not safe.
But sometimes their questions are more practical.
What would happen if I stood in the middle of the target chamber? And so, of course, you have to say, well, nobody stands in the middle of the target chamber. There's no air because it's under vacuum. I think that's really hard for a fifth grader to understand.
My biggest challenge was trying to explain to five-year-olds what we do here at the National Ignition Facility. I think they were impressed. They got a little bit of the sense of how cool lasers are and how fun some of our experiments are.
For scientists at the lab, it's about more than demonstrating concepts. It's about sparking awe. They aim to share the joy of discovery, the satisfaction of uncovering hidden connections, and inspire curiosity that lasts a lifetime. That often means scientists need to boil their findings down to their simplest, most essential truths.
There's a famous physicist called Richard Feynman. He would say, we don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a freshman in undergrad. And he was talking about some very high-level scientific concepts. But when you do that and really explain it in straightforward terms, that's mastery of the topic. Trying to explain something like laser fusion to someone in fifth grade is a big challenge. But I think I've become much better in my own understanding of the high-level stuff as I've had to do this kind of thing.
Making science accessible to children of all ages is paramount. Because at its core, science is simply the way we understand the world around us.
I think it's really important for every citizen to be science savvy. It's important to know how the body works because we all take medicines, we all get colds. A basic understanding of science for everyone is really important.
This starts earlier than you may think. Let's go back to preschool. If you had a sniffly nose or a cough, your teacher probably reminded you to use your elbow or a tissue to help.
And not because the inside of your arm smelled good. While you may not have understood what makes up a bacterial cell, you did grasp the idea of germs, and that we should clean our hands to prevent others from catching a cold too. Practical, everyday knowledge goes far beyond understanding how the body works or when to take cold medicine. Building a foundation of scientific curiosity in childhood helps set kids up for success as adults. Even a basic skill, like knowing the difference between a hypothesis and a fact, can make all the difference when sorting through viral clickbait and unreliable information. This is just one reason why the lab puts so much energy into fostering a love of science.
We're not doing math problems in books all day like maybe a fifth grader thinks their job as a scientist would be. No, we're working at this 10-story-tall, free-football-field-long, world's-largest laser building, producing energy, making starlight, and if we figure that out, we can change the world.
Showing young minds the incredible potential of science, whether it's building lasers or making starlight, can spark the passion that drives the next wave of innovators. As technology accelerates at an unprecedented pace, the future will belong to those who can innovate and solve complex problems. Cultivating a generation passionate about science and technology is not just beneficial, it's essential.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real-world challenges in science, engineering, business, or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a Senior Guidance, Navigation, and Controls Engineer and a Senior Business Operations Specialist. These are just a few of them. The more than 100 exciting roles available. At Lawrence Livermore, you'll work on projects that matter, from national security to cutting-edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration, and professional growth.
About a million years ago, our ancestors figured out how to make and control fire. Things progressed after that. We made it through the Stone and Iron Ages, but it would be a while before the next major milestone: gunpowder. That was only 1,000 years ago, but it's where the exponential growth curve of technology really started taking off. 200 years ago, we saw the steam engine. 100 after that, the first automobile. In 1903, the Wright brothers flew their plane. And only 66 years later...
It's one small step for man, giant leap for mankind.
The time between leaps in technology is getting shorter and shorter. And just like the space race of the 60s, there's competition and an urgent need for the US to stay at the cutting edge. Fusion is set to be one of the next world-changing advances: a clean, renewable energy source that can power the Earth.
I think it's the future. The world's largest laser is the only place on Earth we've made a burning star in such a way that more energy comes out than we put in, and that is the first step towards making a power plant that would solve all of our energy problems. It would be the way that we make energy in the future in perpetuity as a society, as a civilization. We're not there yet, but we are excitingly closer than we were three years ago, thanks to the successes at the lab and in the field.
But to do that, places like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are going to need a lot of excited young scientists.
I tell the fifth graders this all the time. You're going to be the ones that build these power plants, that solve the engineering problems that we now face. And the more of you that are here to help us solve those problems, the sooner it comes. We need to have thousands in the next decade or two help us solve these problems, help us make those power plants and overcome the engineering challenges. If we're really going to convert to this in our lifetime, we need to have people that are interested in and also educated in whatever that ends up being.
And it's not just fusion energy. Fields like nanotechnology and artificial intelligence are already rapidly advancing. The demand for STEM jobs has grown over 30% in the last 10 years, and projections show it's only going to climb higher. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that about 1 million STEM jobs will be created by 2032. That's growth twice as fast as other areas of work. The question is, can the United States prepare its workforce to meet unprecedented demand?
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the pipeline. Are we touching all the age groups? Are we providing activities and programming that's continuous through the K-12 space? It's important to look at these critical time periods like 5th grade, 8th grade, mid-high school, before students make big decisions about college.
The lab has an extensive and diverse group of outreach programs to reach kids at every grade level. Remember those 5th graders expecting a boring field trip?
The Fun with Science program that we do at the Discovery Center is aimed at 5th graders, and that's twice a week.
Students get to learn about lasers and optics and fusion, and get to assemble a 3D whole-room puzzle, and use various exhibits in an interactive way at the Discovery Center to learn more about our science.
The students have an amazing time on this field trip. And in the next year or two, there's still a program for them.
We have STEM Day at the lab. We invite about 250 middle school students for a day of fun at the laboratory. We do two of these a year. We also have a big middle school event called STEM Samhakine, which is also several hundred students for one day.
But then, our cute little fifth graders start to grow up.
Now they're in high school, driving, testing boundaries. Between college majors and careers, they can be overcome with the sheer number of options available. What's the right decision? The folks at Lawrence Livermore know the struggle and offer a clear path.
We have a high school tour program called A Day at the Lab. That program allows a classroom of high school students to come visit the laboratory. We always tour the National Ignition Facility. We may also tour NARAC, or the Advanced Manufacturing Lab, or the Bioengineering Division. We'll visit two or three of these facilities and then join a group of early-career scientists for a career panel and lunch. And then they end the day with time to explore the Discovery Center and learn more about the breadth of our science at the lab, ride our rides, and play our games.
There's coding academies that happen at the lab. There's people that are coming and running them through the same kind of problems that you might start from when you're doing science here at the lab. Just giving them a sense of what it's like to work in this field so that maybe they want to take more science as they progress in school.
And these aren't generic, run-of-the-mill programs. The Lab offers in-depth, hands-on experience in advanced areas of study.
The Biotech Summer Experience is a two-week immersive biotechnology program for high school students to come and learn about real-world skills and techniques in biotechnology. The collaborator at Rutgers provides the initial DNA clones. And students are able to pick a clone and isolate the DNA, sequence it, and learn what the protein that their gene might make that they've sequenced. And if the sequence that they picked was novel, they get to publish in GenBank, which is the real scientific library of all genome sequences.
If you come one year and you've got a project that you enjoy, but it maybe isn't what you want to do the rest of your life, try a different project.
We have a manufacturing work. Workshop for high school students in the summer. We had the first one in 2019, which was a three-day workshop. This past year, we updated the workshop to include CAD design and 3D printing to the workshop. Students got to make part of a keychain that then they added a piece that was machined in the machine shop. And so it was kind of like a coming together of their hands-on activity and the professional machining that we could do at the lab.
Some students already know what they want to specialize in. So the programs are designed to prepare them early for successful careers.
They're already interested at the high school level in Fusion or the engineering on this level or something like that. Coming and getting a personal version of it, a hands-on version, is really their best job preparation. And some of them want to do that pretty early. So we try to accommodate where we can.
But many elementary, middle, and high schools suffer from underfunded STEM programs, especially those in school districts with lower socioeconomic brackets. The lab is located in Northern California, about an hour east of downtown San Francisco. But not every city in the Bay Area is a tech hub. Stockton, Richmond, and Oakland are just a few places in the lab's surrounding areas that are lacking in STEM opportunities.
It is a challenge getting students from quite far east of here in maybe some of the underserved communities.
It is a very small community within a 50-mile radius that we often get to meet students in many ways.
We'll go to Stockton and places east of here. We'll bring some of the portable demos to them, and we call that our Laser Roadshow.
But still, Livermore wants to do more and focus especially on reaching groups currently underrepresented in STEM.
Across the country, there's communities that don't get to see how cool this stuff is, or they don't ever see themselves becoming a scientist or engineer.
This is especially true for women and underrepresented gender identities, who make up only one-third of the total workforce in STEM fields.
Our lab director is a woman. There's a lot of great scientists that are minorities and various stripes that you just have to get them hooked early enough. You gotta let them know that this could be you, too, and give them the resources as we can to start that path. It's a focus for us, and we do our best to try to go to them where we can.
The ultimate thing that we're trying to do in the science education program is engage students to expand their knowledge so that they realize that their possibilities are endless.
Currently, they have two major initiatives aimed at this. Both are for middle and high school students.
SAGE, a program that was incepted by two scientists at SLAC to get more girls and underrepresented minorities involved in science and to learn about the national laboratories.
It's a whole week of activities.
It actually is a residential camp, which means students come to the laboratory and also have the opportunity to have a real overnight camp experience with other SAGE students and haven't been exposed to a lot of science in their experience so far in high school.
The second program the lab employs is called Girls Who Code. It's a national initiative that aims to reach 5 million women, girls, and non-binary people by 2030.
Livermore has had a Girls Who Code program for the past several years. We have volunteers from the laboratory, not only in computing, but in many other directorates, go into the local schools and do after-school programming. We've had about 100 students in the Livermore School District and 100 students in the Tracy School District. Each year for the past few years, participate in the program. And again, we see this as a possible pipeline into our future workforce.
The end of that pipeline gets closer and closer as students graduate high school. Say a few of our 5th graders, now in college, have decided to major in a STEM specialty. Many programs now require internships, and Livermore wants to make sure they're one of the first picks.
Every summer, we host about 900 undergraduate and graduate students to work with our scientists and engineers to do real-world research.
In some programs, Livermore has seen 10% to 20% of these students return to the lab for employment.
The point of it is to do a totally different thing than maybe your normal classwork, or if you're in grad school, your normal research. It's to give you a sense of, do I like doing this? And then it gives you a stop button if you don't like it. And I think it's still a success if they don't come to Livermore, but they go to a different national lab, or they just go into the field.
From a tedious after-recess science class to a career-defining internship. This is dedication to the future workforce at every level. Patrick and Joanna are working on expanding the Fun with Science program from two days a week to three, and expanding both the topics and availability for visits to the Discovery Center.
The waitlist is 30 schools long now, because we try to grab them from all around the area. We try to focus on the underserved communities around here as we can, and there's just not enough. We need more people, we need more time slots. The challenge we're thinking about even now is, how do we bring the right resources to the problem, the right motivation for our mentors, but also giving them the time to do that, to realize a resource that may not come to fruition for several years, but that will pay dividends at that point if we put some effort into it.
Joanna knows firsthand just how rewarding this can be. Around 10 years ago, she met a student through a research program called STAR, or Student Teacher and Researcher, between Livermore and Cal Poly. At the time, the student was an intern.
She was so engaged and excited about doing research. She decided to go back to school and finish her degree in science. She has been on her professional journey for the past 10 years and is now a postdoc at the laboratory.
And just this summer, Joanna saw another student emerge from the pipeline.
She finished high school, went to college, kept her eye on the lab, and just recently returned as a staff member in our environmental group. So it's very rewarding that we really try to inspire students at a very young age to see that I've been in the position long enough to reap the reward, that these seeds were planted and now these students are scientists. And have come back to the laboratory has been really a fabulous part of my professional journey.
Though it may take some time, volunteering and mentorship can add a whole new dimension to feeling fulfilled in the workplace.
It is the best part of my day to see someone, their eyes light up when you explain something to them in a way that they understand. It's a cool way to spend your weekend, for example, at a fairground, talking to kids about science. It's a lot of fun.
Talking to fifth graders and mentoring interns may not be what most employees had in mind when going to work for the lab.
It's a different problem to think about than maybe your day-in, day-out computer simulation issue that you really work on. We can all be good educators. We can all be good mentors to students. It just takes a little bit of practice and a little bit of courage sometimes.
But it's worth it.
We have heard a lot from students who've engaged in our summer programs that it's really opened their eyes to science, changed the way that they've thought about their careers, made lasting friendships, made new networking contacts through our staff and the interaction that they had during the workshop. There've been many students who have really changed their mind about their careers, given the opportunity to see what a day in the life of a scientist really is.
It is so rewarding to see their faces light up. That interaction, and it happens with young students and older ones, it's so exciting. It's why a lot of us get into science.
At Livermore, inspiring young minds is more than just a mission. It's a tradition. One of the lab's most impactful STEM initiatives, Science on Saturday, has been connecting students and the community with cutting-edge science for over 25 years.
We engage scientists and local area high school teachers in doing presentations aimed at middle and high school students. The Science on Saturday program runs every Saturday in the month of February with an hour-long presentation at La Spacida College, starting at 10:00 a.m. We invite students to come and join us. We have also engaged community partners to be there, like the Quest Science Center and Middle College. So students not only get to learn about the great science at the lab, but also get to engage with other science in the community.
Science on Saturday combines the expertise of Livermore scientists with local teachers and organizations to create dynamic presentations for middle and high school students. These sessions take months of preparation as teams work together to break down complex scientific concepts into engaging and understandable lessons. The program is often themed. This year, it is "Up in the Air," where students will explore the innovative work that the laboratory does with aerial and space-based technology.
It is open to the public, so students and their parents can come, and it's a great way to keep open communication about the science that we do at the lab with the community that we serve.
At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, shaping the future goes beyond groundbreaking discoveries. It's about empowering people. Programs like Science on Saturday and others bring this mission to life, inspiring students, families, and the community with a glimpse into the cutting-edge science happening at the lab. Working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory means being part of efforts to change the world. Sometimes, these changes are monumental, like the NIF laser, poised to revolutionize how we power modern life. But just as often, the lab's impact is felt on a deeply personal, human scale.
The spark of curiosity Edward Teller felt as a boy in his father's office led to breakthroughs that reshaped our understanding of science. Today, that same spark lives on in the classroom, in kids tinkering with experiments, building robots, or gazing at the stars, wondering, "Why?" At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, they don't just imagine the future, they invest in it. Through their STEM programs, they're handing young minds the tools to ask the big questions and build the answers. Because the next world-changing idea isn't just out there, it's in them.
Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening.
Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated