Peter Littlewood becomes new director of Argonne National Laboratory

Science : Peter Littlewood, currently the associate director for physical sciences and engineering at Argonne National Laboratory, will become the lab’s director on 1 April. Argonne is one of the ten laboratories run by the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science. Before coming to Argonne in 2011, Littlewood served 6 years as the director of the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge; he began his career at Bell Labs, where he worked from 1980 to 1997. Littlewood follows Eric Isaacs, who stepped down to become the provost of the University of Chicago, which helps run Argonne for DOE. With a budget of $722 million and more than 3000 employees, Argonne is home to a variety of projects in a wide range of subject areas. Like most government research labs, it has suffered from tightened budgets for the last several years, and Littlewood will have to oversee planned equipment upgrades with restricted funding.