Director of the National Security Education Center
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Dr. David Clark is the Director of the National Security Education Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He is an international authority on the chemistry and physics of the actinides. His research interests are in the molecular and electronic structure of actinide materials, applications of synchrotron radiation to nuclear security, behavior of actinide and fission products in the environment, the aging effects of nuclear weapons materials, and the education of judges on the methods of science.
He received a B.S. in chemistry in 1982 from the University of Washington, and a Ph.D. in 1986 from Indiana University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory as a J. Robert Oppenheimer Fellow in 1988. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Los Alamos Laboratory Fellow. He is the recipient of two ACS national awards – the Nobel Laureate Signature Award (1988) and the Glenn Seaborg Award in Nuclear Chemistry (2017).