Genesis Mission

Summary

Big Ideas Lab: "Genesis Mission" (May 19, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Big Ideas Lab, listeners are taken inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for an exploration of the "Genesis Mission": a historic, nationwide effort to fuse the power of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, and experimental science. With interviews from leading figures like Dario Gil (DOE Undersecretary for Science and Genesis Mission Director), Rob Neely (Associate Director for Weapon Simulation and Computing, LLNL), and Lori Dyschen (Principal Deputy for Computing, LLNL), the episode unpacks how Genesis aims to fundamentally accelerate scientific discovery, bolster national security, and maintain the rigor and trust central to American science.

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Main Themes and Purpose

• Genesis Mission's Goal: To create a unified, AI-powered scientific engine at unprecedented scale—advancing US innovation, national security, and discovery by integrating advanced computing, secure infrastructure, and rigorous experimentation.
• Not Just Faster Science: Genesis is about “science first,” not “AI first.” It focuses on problems of national importance—fusion energy, new materials, advanced manufacturing, and more—where speed, accuracy, and security are equally critical.
• Trust and Transformation: The initiative faces challenges in balancing innovation, data accessibility, and robust security—requiring collaboration across national labs, industry, universities, and government.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Historical Vision and Today’s Innovation

• Leibniz's Dream & Modern Science
  • [00:03–01:43] The episode opens with a look back at 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his vision to make reasoning and knowledge "computable":
    • “When controversies arise, it will suffice to say, let us calculate.” ([00:49], Narrator)
    • Dario Gil: Leibniz “already envisioned converting all knowledge into a binary representation... and imagine calculators, machines that would take that binary... and calculate with it.” ([00:55])
  • That centuries-old vision sets the stage for Genesis: scaling scientific insight with modern computing.

2. The Genesis Mission: National Scale and Urgency

• The Manhattan Project Analogy & National Mandate

  • [04:38–05:51] Genesis mirrors historic national initiatives in its ambition and urgency.
  • Dario Gil: “We seek to double the productivity and impact of America’s R&D engine. And the goal is to do that... by building a platform that helps us accelerate discovery, and by constructing and executing a portfolio of national challenges...” ([05:24])
  • Expansion is collaborative: “All 17 natural laboratories are executing together... quite unprecedented.” ([07:24])

• Integration, Not Just AI:

  • Genesis combines AI, supercomputing, experiments, and secure mission environments for a truly closed scientific loop.
  • “We are science first and not AI first.” ([08:41], Dario Gil)

3. AI’s Role: Power & Limitations

• From Language & Code to Science & Security

  • Dario Gil: “AI has done a really good job on things like language and coding, but it is still in the infancy of having a transformative impact in physics and materials and chemistry...” ([08:01])
  • Genesis aims “to push AI towards the frontier of science and engineering... as a tool to help us do better science.” ([08:19], Dario Gil)

• Real-World Acceleration Example: Protein Structures

  • Building on decades of data collection (Protein Databank), AI predictions leapfrog progress:
    • “We went from 200,000 proteins to 200 million in the period of a couple of years.” ([10:47], Dario Gil)

4. The Critical Needs: Trust, Security, and Reliability

• Speed Matters, But So Does Trust

  • In national security contexts, Genesis delivers advances where errors are unacceptable.
  • Rob Neely: “That was an eye opener to me, because it’s like, wow, that is something that would have taken years and years of manual effort to do. And now... in a matter of weeks and months.” ([12:15])
  • Lori Dyschen: “You can't necessarily trust what's coming out of an AI model... Ultimately, the buck has to stop with the human.” ([17:10])

• Continuous Human Oversight

  • Security and mission-critical work mandates rigorous validation, traceability, and human supervision.
  • "[AI models are] probabilistic... often right, but not always... We need to be very sensitive to the risks." ([17:10]–[17:57], Lori Dyschen)

5. Building and Operating at National Scale

• Why National Labs Matter

  • “They are uniquely positioned to create some of the most sophisticated scientific instruments… at a scale that a university could not build and operate, or even the private sector.” ([19:10], Dario Gil)
  • Over 40,000 scientists and engineers benefit from sophisticated facilities and mission-driven teams.

• Upskilling & Data Governance

  • Training nearly 10,000 on-site staff in AI literacy is a massive culture and skills shift ([20:42], Lori Dyschen).
  • Data governance—making data findable, secure, yet usable—requires new boards and metadata cataloging.
    • “Mission is really accelerating that development as well.” ([22:00], Lori Dyschen)

• Collaboration & Security: Lessons from Exascale

  • Balancing open science with classified environments mirrors the Exascale Computing Initiative ([22:57], Rob Neely):
    • “We had to have a unclassified analogy... to partner with people who didn’t have the clearances... this had to work [in classified settings].” ([23:24])

6. The Outcome: A Lasting, Trusted System

• The Final Metric: Trust & Impact
  • Dario Gil: “Do we trust the people, the groups, and the institutions that are carrying them out?... They are people who have been trained and they have a rigor in how they approach it.” ([23:57])
  • Measured not just in breakthroughs, but in concrete benefits—secure energy, faster discoveries, stronger national security.
    • “Did we make Americans lives better when we finished all of this because we were able to deliver more affordable and reliable and secure energy sources to them?” ([24:49], Dario Gil)
    • Rob Neely: “Genesis is going to be a great accelerant of the United States ability to do big science faster.” ([24:58])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Leibniz’s call to “let us calculate.” ([00:49], Narrator)
• “We are science first and not AI first.” ([08:41], Dario Gil)
• “You can’t necessarily trust what’s coming out of an AI model... the buck has to stop with the human.” ([17:10], Lori Dyschen)
• “It is at a scale that a university could not build and operate, or even the private sector. And so we fill that gap.” ([19:10], Dario Gil)
• “Genesis... is not one breakthrough, not one field, not one model. A unified mission.” ([14:04], Narrator)
• “If Genesis succeeds, it will help define how the nation solves what comes next.” ([25:07], Narrator)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Leibniz and the origins of computable knowledge: 00:03–01:43
• National goals and the “Genesis Mission”: 04:38–05:51
• AI in science vs. popular AI: 08:01–08:35
• AI-accelerated protein structure prediction: 10:01–10:47
• Security, trust, and experimentation in pandemic response: 11:31–13:06
• Science first, not AI first: 08:41–09:38
• Data governance and operational scale at LLNL: 20:42–22:36
• Exascale as precursor to Genesis approach: 22:57–23:46
• Defining trust and national impact: 23:57–24:58

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Conclusion

The Genesis Mission, as detailed in this episode, represents a fundamental shift in American science—merging the capacity of AI and advanced computing with the rigor and scale of the national labs. Its promise is not only in speed, but in trusted, interdisciplinary solutions to society’s most urgent challenges. As Dario Gil and the LLNL team emphasize, Genesis’s real legacy will be measured in training, trust, and the tangible impact it brings to U.S. innovation, security, and everyday life.

Transcript

[Narrator]

In the late 1670s, voices rose in a room full of arguments in Paris. At the edge of it all sat Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. To him, the arguments felt predictable, not wrong, just imprecise. Because days earlier he'd been at a workshop, gears turning and a machine that didn't argue, just rules producing answers. The contrast stayed with him. The problem wasn't the ideas, it was the language. What if reasoning worked like the machine? Not argued, but broken into symbols. He wrote his thoughts into words. When controversies arise, it will suffice to say, let us calculate.

[Dario Gil]

He already envisioned converting all knowledge into a binary representation and and imagine calculators, machines that would take that binary representation and calculate with it. And he envisioned that as a possibility of then problem solving.

[Narrator]

A vision from the 17th century.

[Dario Gil]

So that was already hundreds of years ago. Problem is, they didn't have the technology to make it happen.

[Narrator]

Even now, science can model parts of reality. Computers can process data. But no system has been able to do both at the scale that scientific discovery now demands.

[Dario Gil]

I think that Leibniz dream of making all knowledge computable is one that is going to be realized for the first time.

[Narrator]

Now, high performance computing, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies like quantum computing are beginning to work together, expanding what's even possible to model.

[Dario Gil]

The timing is right, the moment is

[Narrator]

now that convergence is no longer theoretical. It's being built across all 17 Department of Energy national laboratories. Alongside universities and industry, a new engine for discovery is taking shape. The Genesis Mission. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab. Your 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 nuclear facility engineer, systems design and testing engineer and a senior scientific technologist, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission driven environment. Discover Open [e-mail] careers where big ideas come to life. Scientific advancement still moves the way it always has. A question, a hypothesis, an experiment, a result. Then the cycle begins again. That process has carried humanity for centuries. It has revealed the laws of motion, unlocked the atom, mapped the genome and pushed the frontier of knowledge further and further forward. What has changed is the scale of the world science is being asked to understand. The problems facing scientists today are larger systems, denser data, tighter timelines and higher Stakes. The challenge is no longer just discovering something new. It's whether that discovery can happen fast enough.

[Rob Neely]

President Trump wants to streamline the regulation process for artificial intelligence.

[Dario Gil]

And the Trump administration is pushing to expand AI in federal scientific research.

[Narrator]

An historic mission, this is reminiscent of the Manhattan Project. The Genesis mission is a coordinated national effort to accelerate discovery by bringing advanced artificial intelligence, high performance computing, experimental science, and the secure infrastructure of the national laboratories into a single engine for science. This is an all in national effort to take the power of AI and pair it with the 40,000 outstanding scientists and engineers at our national labs to advance innovation and science. It is also a way to help the nation move faster from scientific insight to real world capability. Dario Gill is the Department of Energy Undersecretary for Science and the Director of the Genesis Mission.

[Dario Gil]

We seek to double the productivity and impact of America's R and D engine. And the goal is to do that by doing two things. By building a platform that helps us accelerate discovery, and by constructing and executing a portfolio of national challenges of great importance across a variety of domains, from energy to discovery science to national security.

[Narrator]

At its core, Genesis is about helping the United States move faster on the problems that matter most by bringing AI supercomputing and experimentation into the the same scientific workflow. A closed loop system where each result helps refine the next question. Challenges like making fusion energy reliable at scale, discovering new materials that could reshape entire industries, strengthening national security and American competitiveness through faster, more trusted scientific insight and building the next generation of computing itself. The kinds of problems that don't just advance science, they reshape how the world works. Because in areas tied to energy security, advanced manufacturing and national defense, speed becomes a strategic advantage.

[Lori Dyschen]

President Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis mission.

[Narrator]

But this is very all inclusive. We're signing tremendous.

[Dario Gil]

When the executive order was launched, the President entrusted the Department of Energy to lead the Genesis mission on behalf of the country. And the President and the Secretary appointed me as a day to day leader of Genesis. But we recognized from the very beginning that we cannot do this alone. We're executing a strategy that will involve extensive partnerships with industry, partnerships with universities and philanthropy, and partnerships with our sister federal agencies.

[Narrator]

The ambitious goal of Genesis requires equally immense scale.

[Dario Gil]

This is a project that all 17 natural laboratories are executing together. All of them. All 17, which is quite unprecedented that this is happening. And that is because there's not a single domain in their missions and in the practice of science and engineering that is not going to be impacted by what is unfolding with AI and the broader computing revolution story.

[Narrator]

Artificial intelligence is one piece of the system, but on its own, it isn't enough. There's a disconnect between where AI is advancing and where science actually happens.

[Dario Gil]

Private sector has an amazing amount of AI compute capacity in the United States, but it's not true for the labs in the universities. AI has done a really good job on things like language and coding, but it is still in the infancy of having a transformative impact in physics and materials and chemistry and mathematics and engineering. One limitation that we are addressing with the Genesis mission is we want to push AI towards the frontier of science and engineering, so that we can use it as an instrument, as a tool to help us do better science and engineering.

[Narrator]

What makes Genesis different isn't just the systems it's built with, it's what it's built for.

[Dario Gil]

We are science first and not AI first.

[Narrator]

Genesys isn't another AI platform. It's an entire system designed for national acceleration and scientific advancement, including environments where trust, security and human oversight are non negotiable.

[Dario Gil]

The mission around that is to evolve our ability to ask better questions, apply the scientific method. Everything from hypothesis generation to the design of experimental campaigns, the collection of that data, how we share and distribute, how we integrate knowledge across disciplines. So because we're science first, we are focused first on the domains, first on the communities that have been the ones that have been accumulating the knowledge and the experimental capability and the scientific instruments and the wherewithal to push those frontiers forward.

[Narrator]

The proof is already here, not in theory, but in scientific groundwork. Genesys is trying to scale in biology. That foundation took shape in the Protein Databank, a growing archive of experimentally determined 3D molecular structures that began at Brookhaven National Laboratory and was built out over generations.

[Dario Gil]

It expanded to a broad set of collaboration where generations of scientists and microscopists and experimentalists systematically collected samples, used crystallographic techniques to be able to create three dimensional representations of dust structures. 3:50 years of effort of scientists and engineers and user facilities created 200,000 protein structures. And then also the community created its own benchmarks of how you validate it.

[Narrator]

And even that wasn't enough. For decades, scientists had to measure each protein directly, one experiment at a time. Then something changed. Instead of measuring them, we started predicting them with AI.

[Dario Gil]

In that case, a methodological change is I give you a sequence of amino acids and you're able to issue the protein prediction now using a neural network based technique. The amazing result of that is we went from 200,000 proteins to 200 million in the period of a couple of years.

[Narrator]

This kind of acceleration isn't isolated. It's beginning to appear in pockets across the world of research. For the National Nuclear Security Administration labs within the Department of Energy, that possibility carries a specific weight. It means applying AI and advanced supercomputing to some of the nation's most demanding security and deterrence missions. Where speed matters, but trust matters just as much.

[Rob Neely]

It's a new way of doing science.

[Narrator]

Rob Neely is the associate director for weapon simulation and computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

[Rob Neely]

That's not going to necessarily replace the way that we've done science, but it's a new way of thinking about the processes and how to come up with new innovations. And all that's now culminated in the vision that is Genesis mission at Lawrence Livermore.

[Narrator]

That shift isn't just about faster science. It's about enabling mission outcomes in environments where speed, accuracy, and trust are critical. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit, the need for faster scientific workflows for national security concerns like pandemic preparedness became immediate.

[Rob Neely]

There was a lot of effort going on in the science community to understand how to come up with rapid responses to help stop this pandemic. And one approach was developing antibodies. And that was all work that can be done largely computationally. At the end of the day, the result was they went and actually did some experiments in the laboratory using some synthesize molecules to understand, did what AI pointed us to and what simulation told us was possible actually work. And that was an eye opener to me, because it's like, wow, that is something that would have taken years and years of manual effort to do. And now we're able to do this with the help of AI assistance in a matter of weeks and months. And thinking about that in the context of other science problems, the possibilities are almost limitless.

[Narrator]

What emerged in that moment was more than a rapid response. It was a glimpse of a fundamentally different way of doing science, where AI simulation, experimentation, and validation continuously inform one another. So then the question became, what happens when you apply that same approach to the biggest scientific challenges we face?

[Dario Gil]

We've put a list out of national challenges, from fusion materials to a whole host of areas that are really important to us.

[Narrator]

Those challenges stretch across energy, materials, advanced manufacturing, simulation, and national security fields where faster discovery can change what the country is able to build, protect and deploy.

[Dario Gil]

Are we able to realize a world where fusion is part of our ecosystem? That would be an amazing thing. And if people see that hey, look, you guys did a good job on that. And we trust because you deliver the outcomes that you wanted.

[Narrator]

That is the promise of Genesis. Not one breakthrough, not one field, not one model. A unified mission.

[Rob Neely]

It's starting to take all these individual small pieces and get them more unified in looking at things in a common direction.

[Narrator]

For centuries, the idea was ahead of the tools. Now, for the first time, the tools are beginning to catch up. Artificial intelligence, high performance computing, experimental science, the infrastructure of the national labs.

[Rob Neely]

A lot of the pieces are there. It's just taking this big vision of Genesys mission to finally get us to

[Narrator]

bring them all together across labs, universities, industry, government agencies, and all the data connecting them. That's where the real challenge begins. Begins.

[Lori Dyschen]

There is tremendous opportunity and there is some tremendous risk.

[Narrator]

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 Labor Relations Advocate, Operations Cybersecurity Manager, and a senior Database Administrator. These are just a few of 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 and professional growth. Explore [e-mail] careers where your next career move could make history. Imagine a scientist has a question. The data that can help answer it lives in one system. The model that could search it lives somewhere else. The computing power to test it lives somewhere else again. Genesis is the attempt to bring those pieces into one working system.

[Lori Dyschen]

2004. Laurie didn't really even have AI on her radar.

[Narrator]

Meet Lori Dyschen, the principal deputy for computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She works at the cutting edge of integrating AI into the national laboratory system.

[Lori Dyschen]

Computing was very different then compared to what it is now.

[Narrator]

She's not alone. In the span of just a few years, AI went from something most people barely used to something shaping how we write code, search, plan and solve. But inside Genesis and Lawrence Livermore, the shift carries a different weight. Accuracy, security and trust are no longer aspirations. They're essential.

[Lori Dyschen]

You can't necessarily trust what's coming out of an AI model because it doesn't always have that context that you have in your mind, right? It has a probabilistic understanding of what's likely next. And it's often right, but not always. They're probabilistic models that predict what is the most likely thing that's next in A sequence, right? And that sequence could be code, it could be language. And when you understand that, you're able to better assess what the risks are associated with it. Where there may be biases, where there may be errors. And I think ultimately the buck has to stop with the human.

[Narrator]

At the same time, new models of artificial intelligence are being released. That means that scientists have to balance the speed of innovation with the importance of trust, reliability, and security.

[Lori Dyschen]

It's very, very frequent that new frontier leading models are coming out from the various different companies, and those different models have different strengths and weaknesses. We do need to make sure that all of our new uses of AI align with our policies, with our ethics, with the fact that we need to be very sensitive to the risks that it introduces. How can we streamline it in various different scenarios while still maintaining confidence in what we're approving?

[Narrator]

Genesys lives inside that tension. Building it within the national lab system grounds this initiative in the scientific rigor needed to manage risk while still accelerating discovery.

[Dario Gil]

Big science is one of the things that the labs do really well, and we mean by that, is that they are uniquely positioned to create some of the most sophisticated scientific instruments that the nation creates and the world creates. So think about all the light sources and particle accelerators or telescopes that we do in partnership with our sister agencies like NSF and others.

[Narrator]

The national labs matter not just because of their equipment, but because they combine mission infrastructure, people, and rigor.

[Dario Gil]

One of the unique aspects of the labs is you can collect teams and put teams together that do big scientific projects, and then not only we build them, but we operate them. So we operate a large number of user facilities that support 40,000 scientists and engineers across the United States. So that's one thing that is unique. It is at a scale that a university could not build and operate, or even the private sector. And so we fill that gap. Another thing that the national labs do is they have a unique and distinct mission on pushing the frontiers of energy, of the physical sciences and of national security. And as a consequence of that, they are incredibly talented group of people that have the infrastructure, the domain expertise, and the mission to carry out things that are very special at the labs.

[Narrator]

Those tools have to operate alongside some of the most sophisticated systems in the country, and that is where operational complexity begins. Some of that work happens in sensitive national security workforce flows, where AI systems must operate with rigorous safeguards, traceability, and human supervision.

[Lori Dyschen]

A lot of the Genesis mission infrastructure will be built on tools that were developed at Lawrence Livermore in our Livermore Computing program.

[Narrator]

A vision this large is tested in smaller places, in the daily habits of people asked to carry it person by person.

[Lori Dyschen]

We have an incredibly capable workflow for us at Lawrence Livermore. A great set of folks who have proven over and over again that they can adapt to new technologies that are coming out, new ways of doing business, but they need to be trained. There are 9,500 people at this laboratory and there's a lot of work to do to make sure that they're all literate about AI and what's needed for their jobs and how to make them more efficient, more effective, et cetera. So that's one area where we really need to make some investments to make it durable. It's a big job. So there are a number of initiatives that we have undertaken at the institution to help upskill the entire workforce.

[Narrator]

Not a few specialists at the edge of the lab, but thousands of people adapting to a fast moving new technology and making it part of real work. For Genesis to work, data cannot simply exist. It has to be findable, it has to be accessible to the right people and it has to stay protected from the wrong ones. Those requirements became critical as Lawrence Livermore works with production plants and sites to build a digital thread connecting data models and decisions across the mission.

[Lori Dyschen]

We have recently at Lawrence Livermore stood up a data governance board that's thinking about how do we make our data findable and accessible, retrievable, and how do we do that in a way that doesn't disrupt the fact that we've got hundreds of people who have stored data in various different places. So we're creating a metadata catalog and we're talking about the interfaces that you need to allow people to be able to find it and access it. And this is going to be critical across all the plants and sites within NNSA and across DOE and Genesis. Mission is really accelerating that development as well.

[Narrator]

In Genesys, data governance is a key part of building a trusted national security AI infrastructure. That tension between collaboration and security is not new, and for Rob, it echoes an earlier effort where openness at a national scale had to be built without compromising the environments where the work ultimately had to live.

[Rob Neely]

The Exascale Computing initiative ran from about 2016 through 2022 or so and was an all of government effort led by the Department of Energy to understand how can we advance our modeling and simulation.

[Narrator]

That effort required the same balancing act now facing Genesis. Broad collaboration, national scale and work that ultimately had to function inside environments where access could not be taken from granted.

[Rob Neely]

We had to have a unclassified analogy to that so that we could partner with people who didn't have the clearances. But at the end of the day, this had to work. In the classified environment, we solve a lot of the infrastructure problems. In the unclassified network, we come up with similar problems to the kinds of things we're solving that are classified, that we can talk about openly.

[Narrator]

After all of the models, the infrastructure, the workforce, the data, and the secure environments, Genesis still comes back to one can it be trusted?

[Dario Gil]

Do we trust the people, the groups, and the institutions that are carrying them out? We're talking about scientists and engineers putting AI to the uses that they think are most important and also that they are people who have been trained and they have a rigor in how they approach it.

[Narrator]

If Genesis succeeds, it will leave behind something lasting, an AI platform that can scale, a system that can endure, and a stronger engine for scientific discovery across the country. That includes the national security missions that depend on getting the science right and getting it fast. It could reshape how the US Designs, manufactures and deploys critical technologies in an increasingly competitive world. Impact that will not be abstract.

[Dario Gil]

Did we make Americans lives better when we finished all of this because we were able to deliver more affordable and reliable and secure energy sources to them?

[Rob Neely]

I would say Genesis is going to be a great accelerant of the United States ability to do big science faster.

[Narrator]

It will be felt in science, in energy, in national security, and in outcomes people can actually see. If Genesis succeeds, it will not just accelerate discovery, it will help define how the nation solves what comes next. Foreign. 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. Join a team where Expertise makes a Difference Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a nurse practitioner, physician assistant, a senior health physicist, and a laser modeling physicist. And the list of open positions doesn't end there. There are more than 100 job openings across science, engineering, IT, HR and the skilled trades. This is more than a job. It's an opportunity to help shape the future. Explore all open positions and start your next career adventure today at LLNL gov careers. That's LLNL.gov careers.