Biological Systems and Engineering (BSE) Division Director Blake Simmons announced that following a search, Justin Heady has been named the BSE Deputy for Operations. There will also be changes in the leadership of the Bioengineering and Biomedical Sciences Department, effective August 12, 2024.
Heady joined Berkeley Lab as part of the Office of the Chief Financial Officer and was matrixed to the Biosciences Area in 2014. He came to the Lab with eight years of experience as a capital budget and financial analyst at Princeton University and had prior experience in project controls at Merck Pharmaceuticals. Heady has been serving as the Interim Operations Deputy for both BSE and the Area’s Emery Station Operations Center (ESOC) since October 2022. While in these interim positions, he was the Finance and Business Operations Manager for the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), overseeing the financial and administrative responsibilities of all these operations. In addition to BSE Operations Deputy, Heady has also assumed the role of the JBEI Chief Operating Officer and has cemented his role as the ESOC Operations Deputy.
Antoine M. Snijders, who has been with Berkeley Lab since 2008, left on August 9 to join Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as Division Leader of the Biosciences and Biotechnology Division. Snijders came to the Lab following appointments as a postgraduate researcher and postdoctoral scholar at the Cancer Research Institute at the University of California, San Francisco. He has served as Head of the Bioengineering and Biomedical Sciences Department since 2016 and as adjunct professor in the Comparative Biochemistry Program at UC Berkeley since 2022.
Harshini Mukundan, Chemical and Biological Technologies Program Lead in the Lab’s Office of National Homeland Security and the Biosciences Area’s Strategic Programs Development Group, has agreed to step in as the interim Department Head. Previously, Mukundan was a staff scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where she helped to grow their diagnostics portfolio on global health, pandemic preparedness, and national security, and then transitioned to serve as Group Leader for Physical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy. Since she joined the Lab in September 2022, she has been leading chemical and biological technologies program development and establishing her lab in the Biosciences Area.
