Big Ideas Lab - SLAM

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

At the National Lab Research SLAM, scientists from all 17 Department of Energy national laboratories get three minutes and a single slide to explain years of complex research to people who aren't scientists. This is the story of how Lawrence Livermore built a program to teach its researchers a skill that turns out to be as essential as the science itself: making the work understandable. Guests featured (in order of appearance): Brandon Zimmerman - Staff Scientist, LLNL Christine Zachow - Operations Manager, LLNL -- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced by Levi Hanusch. Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Matthew Powell. Story Editing by Levi Hanusch. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch. Brought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

It's 2 a.m. and you're opening the freezer door. You know it's probably not the best idea, but you find yourself grabbing that tub of ice cream calling your name. Knowing it's rock hard, you're gentle with it as you place it on the counter. Careful not to alert anyone of the personal choice you just made. You reach into the drawer and grab a spoon. But not the plastic one. one. You don't even think about it. You just know. You don't put a plastic spoon in there, because intuitively, you know, that would just snap off. You've never taken a material science class

in your life. And you just made a material science decision. That example is how Brandon Zimmerman, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, explained millions of dollars worth of national security material science to a room full of congressional staffers on Capitol Hill. In three minutes. It's not the right material for the role it has to play. And so we're just doing the same thing at the lab. A scientist can spend years on a discovery that could change the world and still lose the room in 30 seconds if no one understands why it matters. So Lawrence Livermore built something to fix that. A program does

designed to take the hardest science in the country and make it land for someone who's never set foot in a lab. From local competitions to a showdown between 17 national labs in Washington, D.C. This is the research slang. 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. Before he was a staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore, Brandon Zimmerman was a

postdoc. And there was one event that every early career researcher passing through the lab was encouraged to consider. The research slam. You have three minutes to explain why your work matters and what you do to broadly a non-technical audience. You're not talking down to them. It's just people who are not scientists in your field doing the stuff you do every day. Brandon has a better way to picture it. If you're talking to a friend of your parents

that you bump into it a party and they ask, what do you do? You don't immediately tell them, I'm solving differential equations. You go higher level. I'm working on how do we make materials that are really strong and light at the same time. You know exactly the moment he's describing. You have about one sentence before their eyes. eyes drift toward the snacks. Only at the research slam, it's in front of a panel of judges.

The research slam is more than a contest for the scientists who go through it. It's a skill that follows them everywhere, funding pitches, policy conversations, grant writing, and the simple moment of explaining your work to someone else. The slam is really about science communication. Christine Zacco is the operations manager in the academic engagement office, at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. How to communicate really complex science to a non-specialist audience. Christine is one of the two people who founded the National Lab Slam. Them being able to tell me creates some trust there.

And that helps bridge that gap between science, policymakers, society in general. It's good for us to fully understand what they do. Christine knows this because her first thoughts about Lawrence Livermore, more were from the outside. I'm two miles down the road. Before I got my job at the lab, it was a mysterious place, what goes on there. I didn't know. That kind of mystery creates distance.

The way across that distance is communication. Clear, relatable communication. These scientists are so smart. And if they can't tell me what they do, I'm not going to get it. From her very first day, Christine's job. was the postdocs, the early career scientists passing through the lab, learning how to build a life in research. About 10 years in, she was invited to watch the University of California's grad slam in San Francisco, a competition where graduate students had to make complicated research

understandable to people outside their field. We saw the great talks that were given. We could identify that these were skills that were so important for young researchers to have, to be able to communicate their science. Christine and her boss had some time together after the event as they took the train back that day. We got on the bar train and went, we have to do this. We have to do this for our postdocs. So they did. One local slam at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but the excitement could not be contained. I have a really close working relationship with my counterpart at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. And I said, hey, you got to come see what we're doing.

She saw it. She loved it, thought it was great, so she took it back to Lawrence Berkeley and did one for their postdocs the following year. As years passed, a regional level was created with more research powerhouses joining in. SLAC, the Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford, and Sandia, the National Lab next door in California. Naturally, this led to one final question. Man, wouldn't this be great if we could do this on a national scale? What if all 17 national labs did this together? They took it to lab leadership, and leadership said yes.

It very quickly progressed to all 17 labs. We had commitment from every single DOE laboratory across the nation that they would train a finalist, prepare them, select one, and send them to Washington, D.C. for this event. What had started as an energetic train ride home was now a national stage. Every lab in the system sending a single champion to Capitol Hill. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the first ever national lab research slam. All 17 national laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy have each send one champion.

The crowd cheers in the Congressional Auditorium, tucked beneath the east front plaza of the Capitol building itself. Large auditorium, red velvet seat sweeping up, and then there's box seats up top. It's almost like you're going to see a mid-tier play. But Brandon is not in the theater yet. All 17 scientists are getting wireless microphones clipped to their lapels by the production crew. On one wall, a six-inch monitor plays a silent, feet of the stage. Brandon can see the person on screen, but he can't hear them talk or tell if the audience is locked in. So mostly, he waits. And what almost no one in that room knows is that

the talk Brandon is waiting to give is not the one he spent months practicing. He had thrown it out. One week before the National Slam, I threw out my entire script and I rewrote it from scratch. So the presentation I gave at the National Slam was completely new. And that change would define his early career. Ladies and gentlemen from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Dr. Brandon Zimmerman. Brandon Zimmerman would represent Lawrence Livermore at the inaugural National Lab Research Slam. But at first, he was not exactly looking for a spotlight. This might take away time for my research.

I don't really want to get up and talk in front of a bunch of things. of people. At the time, Brandon was a postdoc. And at Lawrence Livermore, the postdoc years are not just a holding pattern. They're a proving ground. The lab is watching for people who can grow into staff roles, people who can contribute not only to the research, but to the culture around the research. But I did really want to be converted, and I did want to show that, well, I'm willing to stretch and try these things. So he entered, and set forth solving the puzzle of explaining what he does. Brandon's real work is in solid mechanics. He studies materials that are 3D printed, built up layer by layer into shapes that couldn't exist any other way. We have this great

additive manufacturing thrust at the lab that's been working on different types of materials that weren't able to be created before you could do additive manufacturing. But when you print it from the ground up, you can now make these things that didn't exist before. Lattices full of tiny holes, structures that interact with shockwaves in ways nature never made. These descriptions alone could lose a room. So Brandon went looking for the version of his work that everyone already understands, and that ice cream image became the spine of his talk. We have a specific thing we need to do, and we want to know, can I grab this material?

Will it do the right thing? The plastic spoon snaps. Dang it! The metal one works. You match the material to the job. That's all his research is, finding which new printed material is right for which extreme job at the lab. He didn't dumb the work down. He found the version that was true and gripping at the same time.

But knowing the analogy isn't the same as landing it. Three minutes is not a lecture. You're not just saying what you do. You are giving a performance, so you have to tell a story. And a story has a shape. It has a hook in the first sentence, or you've, already lost. If you don't catch the person's interest and get them to buy into what you're saying right away, then they're already gone. So Brandon built his three minutes like a story with a turn in the

middle. He'd pose a problem, hit a dead end, and then pivot. The very first sentence I wanted to kind of establish, why is this person talking like this? That's an odd thing to say talking about ice cream and plastic spoon. I'll listen a little bit longer to see what it is. And then the way to get the buy in is explain why do we need to do this. Material science research at Lawrence Livermore involves extreme high pressure loading conditions. To survive these loads, I needed to develop an entirely new type of material. The problem is this testing is wildly expensive. The computing power available at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory changed that.

I can't just play with the laser all day, but I can use my computer and our world-class codes to simulate this testing. Running all these simulations saved a lot of taxpayer money, because now, I only have to test my final designs. Once he had that structure, Brandon practiced until the talk stopped feeling like a paper and started feeling like a performance. It was really exciting, though,

because I probably practiced that speech 500 times. He gave it at Lawrence Livermore's local slam. He carried it into the regional competition. And each time, the talk got him one step closer to Washington. But one week before the national slam, Brandon faced a question he couldn't shake. Was the talk that had gotten him this far actually the one he should take to Capitol Hill?

The last performance Brandon gave felt flat. He couldn't figure out why until he met the national coach, John Luke, a scientific communication expert who worked with the finalists on their presentations. He gave us a 30-minute presentation just on like, here's the elements of what makes a good slam, a good non-technical talk. And listening to him, I realized I'm violating that. Brandon sat there realizing he was breaking up. every rule. That's what the issue is. The reason I felt something was off is I'm not doing those

things right and I think I know exactly what I have to do to flip it. So he made the call. One week out, he threw the entire script away. Four months of practice gone. And seven days to write a brand new speech and memorize it before the biggest stage of his career. He tested the new version on the toughest crowd he had. His in-laws, both engineers. Both of them immediately were like, no, that one's not good. It's way too confusing. You should go back to your old one.

Don't use this one. And I remember thinking, I just have to do it like this. I'm just going to ignore your advice. He trusted what John Luke had said about the narrative. He believed the structure made sense and took the new version to the finals. The evening before the National Slam, the finalists ran through their talks one last time in front of each other and the coach. coach. Brandon stood up, opened his mouth, and nothing came out.

So I stood up there for probably 30 seconds, knowing I had to talk tomorrow morning, and I just could not remember any lines at all. Absolutely nothing. Like when you see somebody up there who forgets, you think that they must be thinking, I can't believe this is happening, what are my next lines? I just could not think of a single thing at all. So that night he sent an email. He asked the people from Lawrence Livermore who'd traveled with him to meet him the next morning. And there, in the hotel lobby, he ran it one more time in front of the people who would sharpen him the most, his peers. I think we had 10 people from the lab show up just to let me give a quick presentation in a hotel lobby. So just even that

support was incredible because I just needed to know, okay, with people watching me and being stressed, I still do have a clean one in me. Just a few hours later, Brandon was sitting in that room with the small screen of the stage waiting to be called. There were several hundred people. And it wasn't just the room. Back home, every national lab was streaming it live. Next thing he knew, he was on stage. When I was out there and got started, it just felt like, yeah, I've done this before.

The words were coming a little slower than I wanted, but they kept coming in at the right time. So it felt like, yeah, I've done this before. It's just kind of a practice I'm running through. I can tell that I'm doing a nice job. audience seems into it that kind of carried me through. The finalists waited while the judges made their final decisions. Brandon had done the only part he could control.

Now all he could do was listen for the name. Afterwards, I don't think I really remembered much of the other people. I was just kind of sitting wiped out. And then it happened. I got first place to national security, which I was really excited about. I got a big crystal trophy. I got to take pictures with the other people from the lab team. Brandon didn't just win.

He won twice. Then at the end, they called us all back and they said, now it's time for the People's Choice Award. And to be honest, I was actually kind of hoping they would drop the four winners from that because I thought, you put all that work and you travel the whole way out to go to D.C. It would be terrible if somebody doubled up,

and then it was me. I got People's Choice as well. A few months later, he finally brought it up with his in-laws. To their credit, they were like, yeah, I'm so glad you didn't listen to us. It actually sounded so much better in the real thing. What the experience gave him went beyond the trophies. He left Capitol Hill knowing he could walk into any room,

a congressional hearing, a funding pitch, a conversation at a party, and make the work land. These skills aren't just for the public. They're for other scientists. Brandon came to Lawrence Livermore thinking science communication was something you did for high school outreach talks, until he sat in his first internal funding pitch. So if you're doing an LDRD pitch, the people you're talking to are also scientists with PhDs who work at the same lab you do, and they could be in a field that's so different that they can't really communicate if you just directly explain what you're doing on the day today. It also changed what Brandon noticed in the scientists leading projects around him, specifically the skill of knowing when to leave the details behind.

I have PIs that I work with who we have very technical meetings, and then I sit in on where we're, giving a proposal, and the entire way that they'll talk about the topic switches. I could get you here, or I could save you money, and all of the details on how we do that, but what gets you in the door is not your incredible detailed research plan. It's, are you interested enough in what I'm buying to even get down to that research plan? Christine believes that's the real win. The moment scientists realize how skills from the slam transfer outside the competition. One of the contestants she thinks of most is a finalist on that same stage from a different year,

a scientist who'd been flawless in every practice, who also walked out, opened his mouth, and nothing came out. But this time it wasn't during the rehearsal. He froze. He tried to restart and it just wasn't happening. He tried to restart three, four, five times. And I'm sitting there thinking, oh, how do we get him off the stage and just, and this misery.

It's delivering reliable power where and when it's deeded. But... And then, from the wings, the people he'd spent the whole week with refused to let him go down. One of his cohort members yelled, You got this! The audience all started clapping, and then he did. He got through it. I was so proud that he didn't give up.

It's the part of the slam that doesn't fit on a trophy. The finalists surround. as strangers from 17 different labs, but they leave as a confident cohort. Brandon's cohort from the first National Lab Research Slam in 2023 never stopped talking. So it gives you a better understanding of what all of these labs are, how all of their missions differ, what the working environments are like at those labs. Coming directly out of grad school and knowing nothing about this environment, it just really helps you fit in better, I think.

They still keep in contact. They wish each other happy holidays. They invite and attend each other's conference talks. They report on life events. Ooh, I just bought a house. Oh, I just got another job. Wow, we're having a baby. It's so validating to see that they have such a close connection all these years later.

It makes me incredibly proud to have been part of making this event happen. Science doesn't end at Discovery. It's why a national lab built for fusion, supercomputers, and national security science. will spend valuable time teaching researchers how to use something ordinary, like a late-night trip to the freezer, to explain something extraordinary. I often hear these finalists talk about going to their families and saying, my mom doesn't understand what I do.

And we put them through this training, and they'll come back and they'll say, my mom understands what I do. It's about that. At Lawrence Livermore, the slam is a reflection of what a scientist should be, not just someone who can do the work. but someone who can carry it outward, to colleagues in other divisions, to policymakers, to the public.

It's about getting that message across. It's about talking to sponsors and policymakers and writing grants for funding. It helps them put their research out there in a way that they can get back. It's meaningful because it shows that at Livermore, at the other national labs, It's not just about doing great science by itself. These researchers are expected to communicate clearly, support each other, and then grow into leaders where their work has broader impact across the nation.

For Brandon, the proof came quietly, months after Capitol Hill. He gave a routine update to a group at the lab who had no natural reason to care about his corner of the work. The one person who was leading it was like, that was actually very nice. I felt like I fully followed everything you were saying. That was very cool to learn. And that felt like winning it all over again. That's amazing. Somewhere out there is a person two miles down the road from a lab, driving past the fence, wondering what happens inside.

And in three minutes, a scientist can explain it. 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.