Sunrise to Sunset: Earth Day Opening and Welcome

I think this means we're live. Good morning and welcome to Earth Day with the National Laboratories, the Department of Energy National Laboratories. Today, I have with me three of our co-hosts and my name is Faith Dukes. I'm the Director of Patriot Programs from Berkeley National Lab. We'll be with you today. And I'd like for our co-hosts to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what Earth Day with the National Labs is, as well as a little bit of background about who we are. But thank you for joining us this morning. So I'll pass it over to Anne-Marie and then Joanna to introduce themselves. Hey, good morning, everyone. I'm Anne-Marie Horowitz. I work in the Office of Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, D.C. It's a beautiful day out here and we are so excited to celebrate Earth Day with you all and more from me later. Thanks so much. Over to Joanna. Good morning, everybody. And welcome to Earth Day with the National Labs. I'm Joanna Alballa. I'm the Science Education Program Manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. And today's National Lab Earth Day will be a collective celebration of energy and the environmental research across the National Laboratory complex while demonstrating the commitment, excitement, and importance of STEM with our local and national communities. This virtual sunrise to sunset event begins on the East Coast and concludes on the West Coast and will highlight all 17 National Laboratories with tours, activities, short talks, and panels designed to provide engaging experiences and promote the laboratory complex. We hope you enjoy the day. Welcome. Thanks, Joanna and Anne-Marie. So now we'll get into our schedule for the day. Today we have, you're in our opening and welcome to join our National Labs in our celebration of Earth Day. At 8.45, we'll be joined by Jefferson National Laboratory with Here Comes the Sun. We're starting the sunrise to sunset observation. So we are starting with an actual sun observation with one of our scientists at our National Labs. Throughout the day, you'll see we'll have virtual tours with our National Laboratories starting at 9.15 with NETL and a number of other laboratories will be doing the same. You'll see on the side of our schedule that you may have noticed there are specific activities for K through eight grades. Those are specific demonstrations or activities that you can watch along today. This session will be recorded, so you'll be able to come back and actually do some of these activities with the recording and we'll be posting resources later for you to actually see what's happening. You'll see a few bolded activities. One first at 12 noon. It's a day in the life of researchers at National Laboratories. It's a multi-lab activity where we'll be talking about the careers and career trajectories and research of scientists and engineers here at National Laboratories. You'll be able to ask questions throughout the day using a number of hashtags, including hashtag energyearthday on Twitter. We'll be checking Twitter throughout the day to get a number of your questions and make sure that our panelists answer them. And the second half of our day, we'll be looking at a little bit more of Q&A around carbon filters and mercury speciation, plasma demos, our Renewable Energy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We'll be also sharing some demonstrations. We'll have the flooded classroom with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a number of automated test demos with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and talking about one of the newest buildings being built at Berkeley Lab. Finally, we'll be closing with a sunset ceremony held by Idaho National Laboratory and they'll be showing us their day of Earth Day activities starting at sunrise and into the afternoon. We also have another multi-lab event at 3.15 Eastern time with an ask a scientist a question. This can be any question. We'll start off with a little bit about their backgrounds, but we'll go into a little bit more of what they have to ask, what they want to answer or what you wanna ask throughout the day. Anne-Marie, if you wanna elaborate a little bit more on the labs and Earth Day, we'd like to welcome you back to share a little bit more. Sure, sounds great. So thank you so much again for running this super exciting event. We're really thrilled about it because our national labs are incredible and you'll hear about them all day straight from the labs themselves. But I just wanted to highlight this, what the history of the national lab system is from a very high level perspective and then the labs themselves we'll get into the details later and you'll hear from some of the Department of Energy staff on this. So really they were an outgrowth of immense investment in scientific research, which was initiated by the U.S. government. Really during World War II, the labs have served as leading institutions for our scientific innovation and they've been doing that for decades. The national labs tackle the critical scientific challenges of our time from combating climate change, discovering origins of the universe. They have so many unique instruments, facilities, many of which are found nowhere else in the world and they have the unique capacity to address large scale complex research and development challenges with really a truly multidisciplinary approach that has an emphasis on translating basic science to innovation. So many breakthroughs are coming out of our national labs. It's just really absolutely incredible to see their work. Highly recommend that you go onto our Twitter account at energy.gov. Sorry, it's at energy on Twitter is the handle. So if you go to twitter.com slash energy, you'll find us right there. And we have a list on Twitter where you can follow all of the national labs. Of course, they're all in the social media accounts elsewhere but that's a nice approach to just see what they're all doing and to keep in touch. A little bit more on Earth Day itself and what we're doing today. We're just wanted to highlight the theme of Earth Day is really invest in our planet. From day one, President Biden has made tackling climate change a top priority for his domestic and international agenda. It's really a whole of government approach alongside local government, private sector and it's really accelerating climate action. So we would encourage you to check out energy.gov, our press releases, our newsroom, our website and blog and it really has a ton of information about what the Department of Energy is doing. So thank you so much, Faith, for the opportunity.