I am now retired from active teaching but maintain an emeritus position as professor of the graduate school in the Department of Chemistry or the University of California, Berkeley, and am Faculty Senior Scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). I am a member of the Campus Radiation Safety Committee and continue to advise graduate students and chair or serve as a member of Ph.D. qualifying exam committees and as a reader on dissertations.

Currently, I am a member of several national committees including the selection committee for the National Medal of Science, the National Academies Committee on Nuclear Forensics whose mission is to examine the U. S. capabilities in this area and provide findings and recommendations to sustain and improve them, the DOE’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee subcommittees on Nuclear Facilities and Advanced Nuclear Transformation Technology, the Air Force Technical Applications Center’s Expert Panel to provide technical review of R & D programs related to the Nuclear Debris Collection and Analysis program, and am a member of the Advisory Board for the next meeting of the Asian Pacific Society of Radiochemical Science (APSORC) which will be held in the U. S. in December 2009.

My research interests include: rapid chemical separation of short-lived fission products; separation chemistry of lanthanide, actinide and transactinide elements; search for heavy elements in nature; studies of radionuclide migration in geologic media; studies of the spontaneous fission process; heavy ion reactions and production of new neutron-rich heavy element isotopes; atom-at-a-time studies of the chemical and nuclear properties of the heaviest elements, and applications of ultra-sensitive analyses.

On a more personal note, I am still (after 57 years, our wedding anniversary is 26 December 2008) married to Marvin M. Hoffman, a nuclear physicist whom I met in 1948 as a graduate student at Iowa State University. We have 2 “children” who were born in Los Alamos, NM and graduated from high school during the time we lived there (1952-1984) and both worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Our daughter Maureane Hoffman, M. D., Ph.D., now lives in Durham, NC and is head of pathology at the VA and on the medical school faculty at Duke. Our son Dr. Daryl Hoffman (plastic surgeon) is married to Dr. Susan Hoffman (internal medicine) who was also a Los Alamos native. They live across the Bay from us near Stanford and have our 3 grandchildren: Sarah (19), 2nd year Princeton, plays on the tennis team; Daniel (17), no. 1 in NorCal tennis rankings; Michael (13), a computer ”geek”, also now playing some tennis after operations last year on each foot. As you might expect we have spent a lot of time at tennis tournaments! It runs in my family but at 5’1” I was never a contender—now instead I swim every morning at 5:30 at the Swim Club a block down the hill from our home if I’m not traveling. We still have our home in Los Alamos, NM (Pajarito Acres) which we rent but keep the small guest house to stay in when we go there to visit.