David L. Clark

David L. Clark is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) from October-December 2015. His is a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Fellow, Director of the National Security Education Center, and Research Integrity Officer for the Laboratory. He received a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry in 1986 from Indiana University.  His thesis work received the American Chemical Society’s Nobel Laureate Signature Award for the best chemistry Ph.D. thesis in the United States.  Clark was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. He became a Technical Staff Member in the Isotope and Nuclear Chemistry Division in 1989.  Since then he has held various leadership positions at the Laboratory, including program management for nuclear weapons and Office of Science programs, and Director of the Glenn T. Seaborg Institute for Transactinium Science between 1997-2009.  He has served the DOE as a technical advisor for environmental stewardship including the Rocky Flats cleanup and closure (1995-2005), closure of High Level Waste tanks at the Savannah River Site (2011), the DOE High Level Waste Corporate Board (2009-2011), and DOE’s Environmental Management Technical Expert Group (2011-2012). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow, and Leader of the Plutonium Science and Research Strategy for Los Alamos. His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure and bonding of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to actinide science, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials.  He is a Science Advisor to the National Courts and Sciences Institute (NCSI), where his educational interests are centered in science in the courtroom. He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of actinide elements, and has published over 160 peer-reviewed publications, encyclopedia and book chapters.