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Friday, June 10, 2005
COCHRAN
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Security Organization since
October, plans to leave
LLNL on June 29.
“I’ve worked with great
people at the Laboratory;
there’s been a willingness to
take risks and a willingness
to push people to accomplish
their best,” Cochran said.
In accepting Cochran’s
retirement, Lab Director
Michael Anastasio remarked,
“I have known and personally
worked with Steve my
entire career — first as my
division leader and early
mentor in B Division, and
now as a member of my management
team. Our careers
have intersected throughout
this time frame. Steve has a
combination of technical
acumen, sharp wit and great
passion for our national
security mission. He was
there in the beginning — to
launch the formation and
growth of NAI — and most
recently in the establishment
of our roles for homeland
security. I wish him only the
best for the future.”
Wayne Shotts, the former NAI associate
director and present Lab deputy director for
Operations, noted, “Steve has been a tremendous
contributor at the Laboratory. Since our days together
at Cornell our careers have crossed paths many
times. Most recently, Steve’s energy, technical
breadth, and outstanding leadership skills have been
critical to taking NAI and HSO from start-up organizations
to major components of the Lab.”
A Lab employee for more than 30 years, he started
in NAI within a month of the new directorate’s
formation in 1992 by then-Lab Director John
Nuckolls, who picked Bob Andrews as the organization’s
first associate director.
Cochran has continued to work in NAI for the
past 13 years, holding a number of positions, including
serving for the past 10 years as its deputy associate
director for Programs.
“My role has been to coordinate and integrate the
range of programs within NAI into a single strategy.
Our aim, through our four divisions, has been to prevent
proliferation and terrorism (P Division), detect
and reverse it (Q division), respond (R Division) and
DNA
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of DNA that interact with the proteins that help
control gene expression, can be a long distance
on the DNA strand from the genes they influence.
Recent research also has shown that gene
expression can be controlled by several regulatory
proteins working together at a combination
of different binding sites.
Regulatory proteins are known as “transcription
factors”; transcription is the first step
in the process by which the genetic information
in DNA is decoded by the cell to manufacture
proteins, the building blocks of life.
“It’s difficult to experimentally observe
how transcription factors bind to DNA at a distance
from a gene, or how regulation happens,”
said Krzysztof Fidelis, a computational biologist
in the Laboratory’s Biosciences
Directorate. “But you can identify their binding
sites in a promoter or regulatory region —
there are usually a few of these for each gene.
We wanted to see if we could somehow deduce
how many transcription factors at a time, or
combinations of factors, are coming together
physically and how these combinations regu-
avoid surprise (Z Division),” Cochran said.
“While NAI was formed to combat the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction by both
states and non-state groups, the organization’s
establishment made it natural for the directorate
to extend its capabilities to homeland security,”
Cochran said.
Factors highlighting the need for fighting terrorism,
in Cochran’s view, include the concern over
nuclear materials with the break-up of the former
Soviet Union, the nerve gas attack by the Aum
Shinrikyo cult in Tokyo and later, the Sept. 11, 2001
World Trade Center attack, which he termed “a
defining event.”
“The World Trade Center attack changed our
security perception dramatically enough about
our own security — things that weren’t previously
thought possible became possible.”
Since its inception, NAI has grown significantly,
from a budget of about $60 million and
255 employees in 1992 to its current budget of
more than $300 million and some 865 employees.
The challenge in growing the program,
late genes.”
“To accomplish this,” said the LCB’s Jan
Komorowski, “we used a machine learning
technique called rough sets to mathematically
model general rules that could associate known
binding sites and gene expression in yeast,
which is one of the most widely studied organisms.”
From the analysis of gene activity under
a variety of environmental conditions, the
teams were able to develop a set of rules for
predicting the location of binding site combinations
based on limited binding site and gene
expression data.
“We found that the same transcription factors,
in slightly different combinations, could
be responsible for the regulation of different
genes,” said Torgeir R. Hvidsten of the LCB.
“Thus we now know that binding sites can be
combined to allow a large number of expression
outcomes using relatively few transcription
factors.”
Others collaborating in the project were
Jerzy Tiuryn of the Faculty of Mathematics,
Informatics, and Mechanics at Warsaw
University in Poland; Bartosz Wilczynski of
the Institute of Mathematics, Polish Academy
of Sciences, and LLNL; and Andriy
Newsline 7
said Cochran, has been to have
smart growth — growth that is
synergistic with the organization’s
strategic vision.
“We’ve tried to bring in projects
that are consistent with our
vision and mission for the organization.
We had to figure out who
we were and what we were good
at.”
Cochran came to LLNL in
1974, joining the Weapons
Program’s B Division, where he
worked as a physicist doing code
development for six years. Next
he served as the associate division
leader for computational
physics in A Division and then as
high explosives technology
leader in the Chemistry and
Materials Science Department.
He also was the leader of B
Division for seven years and
then deputy associate director for
Defense Systems and Nuclear
Design for one year before moving
to NAI.
Cochran was named to his current
positions last October
when NAI associate director
and acting director of LLNL’s
Homeland Security Organization,
Wayne Shotts, was
tapped to be the Lab’s acting
deputy director of Operations, a position he now
holds.
During his Lab career, Cochran’s highlights
include the development of a material model for
high explosives, an important contribution to
nuclear explosive safety, a contribution to a
weapons component and his work in NAI.
“I can’t take credit for hiring Mike
Anastasio, but I can take credit for giving him
his first two promotions at the Lab,” Cochran
said.
His main reason for retiring, he said, is so he
and his wife, Cynthia, can move to the East
Coast to live near their three children, Stephen
Jr., Meredith and James, and their two grandchildren.
He also believes the timing is right for the
directorate.
“Change is good,” Cochran said. “I’ve been at
the Lab a very long time and I’ve certainly enjoyed
my tenure in NAI. But there are a lot of new ideas
out there and it’s time to let those emerge. I look
forward to seeing all the great things that can and
will happen with this directorate.”
JACQUELINE MCBRIDE/NEWSLINE
Former P Division leader and retiree Bill Dunlop (left) shares a laugh with Steve Cochran,
the acting associate director for NAI who is retiring June 29, and his wife, Cynthia, during a
retirement celebration in Bldg. 132S Thursday afternoon.
Kryshtafovych of LLNL. A report on the joint
work appears in the June issue of the journal
Genome Research.
The rough set technique was developed by
Zdzislaw Pawlak in Poland in the 1980s and is
particularly suitable to build models from
incomplete and uncertain data. It has been
used in applications ranging from medical
and financial data analysis to voice recognition
and image processing. Applied to gene
regulation, the approach was able to predict
the location of regulatory sites for about onethird
of the genes in the yeast genome — a
success rate as good as or better than other
current techniques.
“The next step is to test this approach on
different organisms, including microbes and
vertebrates,” Fidelis said. The growing number
of organisms whose genomes have been
sequenced has generated a wealth of DNA
sequence information that could provide the
raw material for analysis.
Primary funding for the research was provided
by LLNL’s Laboratory Directed
Research and Development Program, the Knut
and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the
Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.