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Congressional Daily Record
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June 30, 2026
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Download official Extensions PDFReturn to issue contextHONORING 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.