"The world has become a scary place again"
A Boomtown Q+A with Los Alamos National Laboratory Staff Director Frances Chadwick
Interview by Stephanie Nakhleh and Minesh Bacrania
Photographs by Minesh Bacrania
Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On April 8th, Boomtown sat down with Frances Chadwick, the Staff Director at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), to discuss a wide range of topics affecting LANL, the town of Los Alamos, and Northern New Mexico.
Boomtown: Tell us about yourself. You were raised in the UK — what was your path to Los Alamos?
Frances Chadwick: I grew up in a coal mining village in south Wales, not the most glamorous part of the UK. You know how your teenage years are, your very formative kind of years? For me there were two things: one was Margaret Thatcher. I also distinctly remember the Soviet threat. Living in Europe in the 1980s, it felt quite real. So in some ways it feels a little ironic that I’ve ended up here in Los Alamos.
My goal was to get out of Wales as fast as I could, so I went to university in England, that’s where I met my husband. We thought it might be fun to come to the States for a year or two. When you're 21 and just married, you feel like the world's your oyster, right? We came here to Los Alamos in 1990. A couple of years later we went to California for three years, then came back here in 1996. I've lived here continuously since 1996. I still call myself a trailing spouse.
My first degree was in English literature. When I was in California, I went to graduate school and did an MBA. In the first half of my career I worked on what I call the business operations at the Lab. Then I became the business manager for the weapons program, and from there became a program director within the weapons program. I had the opportunity to join the Triad bid team back in 2017 and now here we are.
How would you characterize the relationship between LANL and the Los Alamos County government?
I think it's pretty good. I meet regularly with people in the county, we meet with people like the school superintendent periodically, and we do that with other surrounding communities as well, of course. I think we have an open line of communication with them. For example, on housing, we started signaling to surrounding communities, including Los Alamos, that we're going to be hiring significant numbers of people. From my perspective, that's where the free market should come in. We can signal that demand and hopefully developers see that as a business opportunity, and step up to meet that demand with increased supply.
If you drive around town, there’s a lot of increased construction. It doesn't ever happen at the pace one would like, obviously. Santa Fe has also been building: that's been a good thing from our perspective. If we're going to attract people to work here, they need somewhere to live. A lot of our hiring has been people who already live in New Mexico. Many of the jobs that have been created are ones that didn't necessarily require a PhD in some esoteric aspect of astrophysics or whatever. But with some things we felt there's no reason why local people wouldn't have or couldn't learn the skills to do those jobs. And we felt hiring locally is a good thing.
In our interview with Los Alamos County Councilor Randall Ryti, he spoke about the partnership on the two sides of the bridge. He said that it can be difficult because LANL has “their own metrics” and they “have to meet their milestones.” But isn't the town side of the bridge an important part of the metrics and milestones, because of recruitment?
Oh, absolutely. A lot of people don't want to commute, and do want to live here. But it's a little hard to tell. You never know whether somebody bought in Santa Fe when they would have preferred to be here.
Are there surveys about that? Because that would be useful to know.
I don't know, but look, as the supply of housing has increased and hopefully will continue increasing, people will make their decisions as to where they want to live. I’ve known many people who've started off in Santa Fe but want to move to Los Alamos because they want their kids to go to Los Alamos schools. We also know people whose kids have gone to Santa Fe public schools and have been perfectly happy with the experience. It's an individual choice for a family, right? But the schools definitely are a factor — they certainly were for our family in deciding to live here. We were both working at the Lab, so we preferred not to commute if we didn't have to. We had three kids who all went through the school system here, and it was convenient. For us, that was a high quality of life. It's about nine minutes, depending on the lights, from my house to work. That's really, really nice.
We have few amenities in Los Alamos if you're coming from virtually anywhere else, but the outdoors are one of them. How do you see that amenity?
I would say the outdoors is our greatest amenity and it outweighs most of the others. If you want entertainment and shopping, this is not a good place to live. People who stay up here are generally people who do like the outdoors, absolutely, no doubt. It's a big recruiting thing. The value proposition that is working at Los Alamos is to live in an incredibly beautiful part of the world: we're in this pristine atmosphere at 7500 feet, but with a high-tech place to work and incredible schools, incredibly safe. If you want to live in Los Alamos, it's very family friendly. That’s something we should lean into: you can live close to your work. You've got good schools for your kids, it’s safe for them to play in the neighborhood after school. That's one of the biggest things we've got going for us. I would say that if the attractions that come with living in the mountains don't appeal to you, you should probably go work in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, or Livermore, California. And you'd have a much happier life, right?
But does the increasing percentage of commuters affect your ability to recruit and retain people? Or do you think the people who want to stay are committed, even if they have to live an hour or two away?
That’s their choice at some level, right? We don't have the attractions of a big city and we're never going to and we don't aspire to. What you see is what you get at some level. And you either like it or you don't.
The fact is we have hired successfully the last few years to do the scope that we've been asked to do for the nation. Director [Thom] Mason talked about this in one of his recent town halls. We’re reaching a bit of a plateau, probably around 18,000 employees total, including contractors. We don't see any significant increase in the near future. We're happy with reaching that plateau — we're not aspiring to have another period of growth, let's put it that way. It's been hard enough as it is. I don’t think when Triad took over the contract we were expecting our budget to pretty much double in five years. And it has.
Then obviously there was the pandemic, which most of us would rather forget. And then there’s just the fact that the world has changed. Thom talked about that at the town hall as well. When we took over on November 1, 2018, we didn't know Russia was planning on invading Ukraine or war would break out in the Middle East.
Going back to the opening question, growing up with that Soviet threat and it being a little ironic that we're here — one of the things about Los Alamos has at various times had an outsized role in the world. That was true during the Manhattan Project, for sure. Also during the Cold War. It’s a place that’s always borne a bit of the weight of the world on its shoulders.
I was reading an article on NATO in the New York Times that quoted a French diplomat saying the last three decades have essentially been the three “lazy decades” for the West. The West got lulled into this sense of security. Countries like Germany weren't spending much on defense and didn't see the need to. That’s all changed in the last little over two years. Once again, Los Alamos has become, in your parlance, this boomtown. But a lot of that is because the world has become a scary place again, and the nation looks to its national security labs to help manage its way through that, to do work that allows us to maintain our defensive posture against would-be aggressors.
We held an internal LANL workshop recently around the whole theme of LANL being a “force for good” in New Mexico, which is a phrase I coined about two years ago to talk about Los Alamos’s role in northern New Mexico. Los Alamos used to be this scary, isolated place at the top of the hill, where nobody quite knew what they did up there, which was absolutely true in the Manhattan Project. It was a secret town with a lot of secrecy around it. Now we have a deliberate attempt to have a more transparent relationship, which is why we do things like the public town hall, where Thom takes public questions, including from the anti-nuclear lobby.
At our internal workshop, we had a guest speaker who was a professor of economics at UNM. He had a pretty punchy way of saying it, he said, Los Alamos is probably one of the most important places to determine the certainty of the future of this planet. You hear that, and you’re like whoa. So, yes, we're this boomtown, but we're once again in this place where boy, the country's depending on us.
Every year the housing situation gets worse. When you’re recruiting young people into science, they come here for the summer, can't find a place to live, and have to camp. Is there consideration given to that? How does that affect your long-term pipeline?
I've turned some of my attentions to student housing, which is now something we're putting quite a bit of effort into. We can't use federally-appropriated dollars, just like we didn't with the childcare. But we are working on something: not quite ready to announce anything yet. Probably a year-or-two type of timeframe to completion.
What advice would you give young people or young couples coming to the Lab? We’ve talked about the family-friendliness and the outdoors. If people are deciding between Livermore, PNNL, or here: what would you say?
I would say Los Alamos still is a fantastic place to have a career. The breadth of science and the breadth of missions that we do here are pretty much unparalleled. It's still an exciting place to have a career. No doubt about that.
Yes, there are pressures on housing. If you were to go to Livermore, California, you’ll find pressures on housing as well. It's not unique to us. I think those will ease as housing developments complete. There are other nice places to live besides Los Alamos within commuting distance. One of the silver linings of the pandemic is the ability to do remote and hybrid work, which has made arrangements that if you had to commute five days a week you wouldn't consider, but which you might if you can work from home a few days a week. That’s something we're making quite a bit of use of. Also, we now have three quite significant footprints in Santa Fe, and that’s made Albuquerque a credible place for people to live. That’s taken some of the pressure off housing up here as well.
There are limitations, though, right? You can't do certain mission work offsite.
With our current setup, yes, but a good amount of the work we do is not on classified computers. All my work is on an unclassified computer, for example, and I'm down in the Santa Fe Guadalupe office once or twice a week. A lot of my staff work there.
We used to have a footprint in Santa Fe in the 1940s. We like to say we’ve returned to Santa Fe after a hiatus of several decades. [Laughter] It’s made us a bit more accessible to the community in Santa Fe as well. Santa Fe has been a place where the anti-nuclear lobby have tended to protest, and I'd hope that they would also see us as being a positive.
In the early 2000s, I'd be at a party in Santa Fe and hear: “Oh, where do you work?” And you'd say you'd work at the Lab, and immediately the reaction would be, “I'm sorry. It must be so hard to work there.” I don't get that anymore. In fact, and I'm being totally honest in this, people have said to me, totally unsolicited, “Oh my gosh, thank you for what you do up there. The world's a scary place, and I'm so glad we've got world-class people working on these things there.” You don't feel like you have to hide or pretend you don't work at the Lab.
Are we going to convince people who fundamentally disagree with nuclear weapons? No. But we would hope that at least they would understand and not feel antagonistic and also, frankly, appreciate the economic benefits that come from a lab our size.
I mean, we're talking $5.2 billion of new money this year, and the payroll that goes along with that. Our monies get either spent on people, which is payroll, or buying things. Procurements. This is part of the “force for good.” We put a high store on trying to buy things from small New Mexican businesses where we can, so the economic benefit of New Mexico is significant. If the anti-nukes got their way and the Lab went away? Boy, this would be a very different area.
Let’s talk about the new daycare facility in Los Alamos. You and the chair of Triad’s board, Jay Sures, were instrumental in getting that project off the ground. It seems he heard the idea and was like, “we're going to make this happen.” Which tells you how important leadership and vision are. How do we get more of that leadership and vision to get more things from the back burner to the front?
Well, as I say, stay tuned in on student housing. So the issue of childcare: we have these things called employee resource groups, which are a way for employees to converge around certain issues: it could be women, it could be LGBT, it could be African American. The women's ERG and the dependent-caregiver ERG hosted a panel on childcare. This was while we were still in the pandemic mode, and if you recall, childcare was one of the industries that was decimated during Covid. I was one of the panelists, and I can remember to this day that the chat was just constant with, “oh, my gosh, I can't do this, there's no ability to provide for care for these hours.”
So there's a lot of angst in the workforce around this. After that panel half a dozen employees even reached out to me personally because they wanted to share their particular story with difficulties they were having. So, I’m thinking, what are we going to do about this, because federal appropriations don't pay for childcare, right? This is where having the office in Santa Fe was helpful. On my days down in Santa Fe, I would arrange to meet up with organizations like Growing Up New Mexico, which is trying to raise the level of childcare for New Mexico. I met with a person who runs a childcare education program at Santa Fe Community College. I also met with the New Mexico early childhood education secretary. Apparently New Mexico is one of a small number of states that actually has a cabinet-level department devoted to early childhood.
I met with a whole series of folks and almost without fail, they said the main path forward in the industry is that employers must step in. The free market, on its own, does not seem to be able to rise to the demand that's out there. There was also the CHIPS [Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors] and Science Act . They said for chip makers to get subsidies to bring their manufacturing back to America, they had to subsidize childcare for their employees. The cabinet secretary said that they certainly were encouraging it. But one of the questions I had for her was, “has anyone got a model out there for this?”
If we were Google, right, you can just use your monies to do these things. But with LANL being a federally funded entity, we have this slightly different model: funds are appropriated, and we can't just go use them however we want.
Around that time came along Jay Sures, who is and was then a regent of the University of California, and at that time, he was the chair of the LLNS board. LLNS [Lawrence Livermore National Security LLC] is the company that runs Livermore. He was not yet on the Triad board, but he came for a visit for a day. As he was leaving that evening, he said, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
I said, “You know, if the University of California were willing to put in money, because they can do that, then it's not federally appropriated funds, it's them operating as a parent entity. If they were willing to invest some money in student housing, childcare, that could help.” I didn't think I'd ever hear anything from him. But I got a phone call about a week later saying, “All right, if I can get some money from the regents of the University of California, what could you do? I kind of like that childcare thing you said that you were having issues with.”
One of the things with childcare: you see a lot of them are based in old school buildings and also in churches. That's because it's an industry which lacks that capital investment to have a facility. So that was the idea that we came up with — if UC could put in the money to renovate and provide a really nice facility, then could something come of that? The Lab has expertise in lots of things, but childcare is not one of them, except as individual parents. But we thought, could this be a business opportunity for some local provider that knows how to do childcare? Might they want to expand their business if we could provide the facility in which they could do so?
Ryn Herrmann [director of the Los Alamos Chamber of Commerce] worked with us to organize a meeting with all the childcare providers in the county, both long-established ones like the YMCA and the Ark, but also anyone who had a licensed childcare at their house. We had a big open meeting with them. What we had done internally is a survey around the Lab to figure out what the demand was, because some people were skeptical of the need. They said, “how do you know that it's going to get filled?”
There's never been enough daycare in Los Alamos!
For you it seemed obvious, but not to other people. The other concern was, if we do something, we'll put everybody else out of business, which we absolutely didn't want to do. That was one of the main reasons to meet with the local community. There seemed to be absolutely no reason why anyone would go out of business, because there just weren't enough places. We simply needed to expand it. Indeed, in the survey that we did, I think 250 parents responded saying that they either had no care, inadequate care, or not the care that they wanted for their kids. That’s quite a lot of people.
How many seats are in the new one?
We're hoping it'll be 150 when it's fully licensed. It doesn't fix the problem, but it does make quite a big dent in it.
So we then did the RFP process. We had quite a few applicants and we put together a committee of folks to downselect to the top two or three, then we did another round with them. And that's how we came to select the Bilingual Montessori. We were impressed with the real sense of passion and dedication that the owners expressed. They had spent their lives showing commitment to developing children. They were strong proponents of the Montessori way of learning. It’s a husband and wife couple who run it. They had stood up two centers in White Rock, so they had gone from start to finish, they knew exactly what it took.
We signed an agreement with them and then signed a construction contract with a local construction company to do this renovation on the- I guess people call them the “tiki huts”. Then I had to go to the Triad board and persuade them to put in new additional dollars to help with the operating costs going forward because we were committed to making this a success.
The other thing that I was passionate around was providing healthcare and benefits for the employees, so with the operating dollars that we committed to providing them, Odalys [González, the daycare director] is now able to offer those benefits. Not only for the employees at the new center, but also for her existing employees in White Rock. That’s almost unheard of in the industry. She said on the day when she shared this news with her staff, several of them were in tears. They had never imagined getting benefits. Many of them have husbands who work as day laborers in the construction industry. They don't get healthcare. It's empowering for this set of employees now, most of whom are women. They’re the ones who are now providing healthcare for their families.
It seems to have happened so fast, especially given the bureaucracies involved.
Like a year and a half. This time two years ago was when I was having all those conversations with people. Jay Sures's visit was in June of 2022. Last May was when we were publicly able to announce the partnership, then move forward with the construction. For me, I was passionate around this because it felt like the life I had lived. For working parents, there's an absolute fundamental tension between trying to be a parent and trying to be an employee.
The 2023 Nobel Economist Prize winner, Claudia Goldin, the way she had coined this I thought was a great way to think about it. She said, jobs like lawyers, scientists, they're quite greedy jobs. You're on your phone, the job demands a lot. And she said, you know what else is a greedy job is being a parent. You can't just say, oh, it's Saturday, I'm not going to be a parent today. You're always on. She did quite a lot of research around that fundamental tension: you can't do two greedy jobs at once. It's very, very hard to balance. That was certainly my experience. I found being a working parent really, really hard.
Did you stay home when your kids were young?
No, but I worked part time for a while. There was no maternity leave at the Lab when I had my three kids. The way it worked back then is you had to use up all your vacation and all your sick time. You come back to work with no sick time, no vacation time, and a little baby who is now going to daycare, who you know is going to get ill! It sets parents up for failure and for a lot of stress.
I give a lot of credit to [former LANL director] Terry Wallace for introducing maternity leave. He introduced six weeks of leave when he was director, which was way overdue. When we were having discussions two years ago in Triad about changing our benefits, I put my hand up and said, “we need to increase maternity leave.” I remember somebody saying, “We already have it.” And I said, “It's not long enough.” I went home that night and did lots of research and got citations from the American Academy of Pediatrics and whatever, and we've doubled it to 12 consecutive weeks around the date of birth.
Now there's ‘paternity’ leave at LANL, too.
Absolutely, yes. The Lab actually grants four continuous weeks of parental leave bonding time for a new parent who did not give birth.
I love America, right? I'm a first-generation immigrant. But America is, frankly, behind most other developed western countries when it comes to care for young children and parental leave. The Scandinavian countries lead with something like a year and a half of fully paid sick leave. But most countries in Europe, and I grew up in Europe, had far more generous leaves than America has. It's moving in the right direction, it's just a little slower than one might have expected. A lot of women are in the workplace now. It's not like we're back in the 1950s when as soon as a couple had kids, the woman stayed home. So this will be a nice thing for people who come after us, let's put it that way.
Assuming the new daycare is successful, is there a phase two? Can you do another one?
One step at a time. I'm working on it. [laughter]
In 2023, LANL spent $930 million on New Mexico businesses and $1.8 billion in employee salaries. The regional economic impact of the Lab is enormous. But northern New Mexico is still plagued by poverty. How do we turn the economic engine of the Lab into helping the region thrive?
That's certainly part of our effort with the “force for good.” I already talked some about how we are directing much of our procurement to New Mexico businesses, and that's about a billion dollars this year. Our total procurement is a little over $2 billion. So about half of our procurement is staying here in New Mexico. And of the $1 billion, about $600 million is small business within New Mexico.
Of course, the payroll does that as well: people earn money and then spend money and buy a car and buy gas and all that. Through both our payroll and our procurement, we certainly do have a big impact.
We also do philanthropy to try to leverage that even further. The Triad board authorizes — and it comes through me, to the community partnerships office — monies to support areas that are outside of what we do in terms of payroll and procurement. We do that in three different ways: education, economic development, and philanthropy.
For example, for education we give a significant donation to the LANL Foundation, which is an stablished entity that works on educational programs throughout northern New Mexico.
We also have something called the Math and Science Academy, which is a professional development program for STEM teachers in participating schools. Pojoaque and Espanola are the main areas we’ve focused on. I joined one of their sessions a couple of Fridays ago: it's honestly eye opening to hear the challenges that those teachers have with keeping their kids focused, with getting the supply of teachers. We want to support the teachers to stay in the profession, to develop themselves to be effective, because by doing that, they will in turn foster a love of learning in the children who will hopefully go on to be future employees of ours. I mean, that would be the ideal thing.
Then we give money to the Regional Development Corporation, things like small business incubation. It’s basically money to help businesses get off the ground.
Finally we have what I'd call more pure philanthropy. There are lots of needs in northern New Mexico, whether it's dealing with housing insecurity, food insecurity, substance abuse, a whole range of areas. We give monies via a quarterly grant process through the community partnerships office that any entity can apply for.
Finally, what do you do during your spare time? Tell us something interesting that we can leave with our readers.
Definitely the outdoors. We chose the house that we live in because it backs onto the National Forest. Every single day I am in a canyon or on a trail of some sort, whatever the weather. That's been one of the truly great things for my family about living in Los Alamos.
