J. Charles Barbour is Director of the Radiation and Electrical Sciences Center at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the responsible Director for the Sandia Nuclear Criticality Safety Program. Charles directs multiple levels of management for high-hazard accelerator and nuclear facilities operations including: Annular Core Research Reactor Facility, Gamma Irradiation Facility, Auxiliary Hot Cell Facility, Saturn Pulsed Power Accelerator Facility, and High-Energy Radiation Megavolt Electron Source. Further, he has responsibility for electromagnetic facilities operations including: Lightning Facility, Electromagnetic Environments Simulator, Mode-Stirred Chamber, and High Voltage Testing Laboratory. He sets strategic directions for research in radiation effects on devices and circuits, electromagnetic and nuclear environments, and electrical systems modeling. He created and managed a major National Nuclear Security Administration project to develop new methods for system level qualification in radiation environments through close coupling of experimentation with materials, devices, and circuit modeling. He is now helping the nation change the way it approaches survivability of its critical assets in the most severe environments.
Dr. Barbour received a BS degree in Engineering Physics from the Colorado School of Mines (1980) and a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell University (1986). He joined Sandia after one year in The Netherlands as a visiting scientist at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics (Amsterdam) and Philips Research Laboratories (Eindhoven). He is the author or co-author of more than 150 technical papers and holds several patents.
Dr. Barbour is Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). He has been an active volunteer and member of the Materials Research Society (MRS) and served on the MRS Board of Directors. Dr. Barbour has organized conferences for and served on the International Committees for the Ion Beam Modification of Materials Conference and the Radiation Effects in Insulators Conference. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the APS.