Christina Van Drunen

Intro
My name's Christina Van Drunen, and I'm CNL's Director of Science and Technology Strategy and Collaboration.

What would you say to aspiring young women considering a career in STEM fields? I would say absolutely go for it. The beauty of science and math is that you can be very directly involved in tangibly solving challenges that the world has today and that we're going to need addressed so that we can have a great future.

My favorite science fiction film? That would be Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and you can read all kinds of symbolism into that.

What's your favorite part of working at CNL? So for me, it is the incredibly diverse things that we've been doing on the site. Even when I was working here as a summer student more than 20 years ago, it seemed like anywhere you walked on this site, you could find a world expert that was doing something really interesting.

What is the biggest highlight of your career? Recently, working on, as I said, the 10 year plan for CNL. It's the first time for the labs that we've actually looked at our; decommissioning and waste management work that we need to do and facilities that we need to bring on board to enable that to happen. How we're going to actually decommission over 100 structures that are on the site; At the same time, what is the important science that we want to do over the course of the next 10 and 20 or 30 years; and tying that into how are we going to develop the site itself with new facilities or revitalized labs in order to make all that happen. So working on that would definitely a major highlight for me.

 

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