[Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 109 (Tuesday, June 30, 2026)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E643]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




HONORING THE CAREER OF DR. MICHAEL WITHERELL, DIRECTOR OF THE LAWRENCE 
                      BERKELEY NATIONAL LABORATORY

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. LATEEFAH SIMON

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 30, 2026

  Ms. SIMON. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to honor the distinguished 
career of Dr. Michael Stewart Witherell, the Director of the Department 
of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
  Dr. Witherell was born on September 22, 1949, in Toledo, Ohio. In 
1968, Dr. Witherell received his Bachelor of Science from the 
University of Michigan and went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University 
of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973.
  Dr. Witherell began his academic career as a faculty member at 
Princeton University. In 1981, he moved to the University of 
California, Santa Barbara, where he would eventually become the UC 
Presidential Chair in Physics. As a working experimental particle 
physicist, Dr. Witherell pursued groundbreaking research focused on the 
fundamental building blocks of matter. This pioneering work earned Dr. 
Witherell the prestigious W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental 
Particle Physics in 1990. In his later career, Dr. Witherell researched 
dark matter, contributing to the design of the LUX-Zeplin (LZ) dark 
matter experiment. Dr. Witherell's research and experimental work is 
highly respected in his field and continues to be widely cited to this 
day.
  In 1999, Dr. Witherell accepted the role as Director of Fermilab, the 
country's leading laboratory for high-energy physics. During his 
tenure, from 1999 to 2005, Fermilab upgraded its Tevatron accelerator 
complex and completed a $150 million project to build a long-baseline 
neutrino facility capable of beaming neutrinos 450 miles underground 
from Illinois to a detector in Minnesota. Dr. Witherell's visionary 
leadership at Fermilab earned him the U.S. Secretary of Energy's Gold 
Award in 2004, the Department of Energy's highest honor.
  From 2005 to 2016, Dr. Witherell served as the Vice Chancellor of 
Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In that role, 
Dr. Witherell helped increase extramural research expenditures from 
$165 million to $227 million.
  In March of 2016, Dr. Witherell was appointed Director of the 
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, overseeing a workforce of 4,000 
and five national user facilities serving over 17,000 researchers 
annually. Throughout his tenure, Dr. Witherell spearheaded a mass 
modernization of LBNL's facilities initiating the Advanced Light Source 
upgrade, completing the Perlmutter supercomputer for the National 
Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, commencing the Doudna 
supercomputer project, and completing the Energy Sciences Network 
upgrade ahead of schedule. Dr. Witherell also helped drive investment 
into LBNL, leading to the creation of the Integrative Genomics 
Building. Under Dr. Witherell's leadership, LBNL has received more 
Early Career Research awards than any other national laboratory. Since 
2016, many of those awards were for early research in the fields of 
quantum information science and artificial intelligence, positioning 
LBNL to take a significant role in these national priority areas. Under 
his leadership, LBNL also became the first of 10 Department of Energy 
laboratories to earn grades of A- or above in all eight areas of its 
annual performance evaluations for four consecutive years, 
demonstrating Dr. Witherell's remarkable operational acumen.
  Throughout his storied career, Dr. Witherell has consistently 
demonstrated deep curiosity, managerial excellence, and a commitment to 
public service and the advancement of scientific knowledge. Our country 
has been lucky to have Dr. Witherell at the helm of some of our 
Nation's premier laboratories and research institutions. I wish Dr. 
Witherell a happy and healthy retirement, and I sincerely thank him for 
his contributions to the United States.

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