GA Vice President Mike Campbell said, "Joe has had a distinguished career in Inertial Fusion and High Energy Density Physics research and he brings to GA a wealth of expertise and experience in all aspects of its science and related technology. This experience and familiarity with the program and its participating laboratories will be of great value to GA and the GA/Schaffer Team in supporting the target fabrication needs, including characterization, of the laboratories today and in the future."

Kilkenny was educated at Imperial College, London University, receiving his B.Sc (first class) in 1968 and Ph.D in 1972. From 1972 to 1984 he was a faculty member of Imperial College, conducting research on implosion physics, electron transport and hydrodynamic instabilities using the laser facilities at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. During these years at Imperial, he and some former graduate students also founded Kentech Instruments, a company that specializes in high-speed instrumentation and was promoted to the position of Reader (equivalent to full professor).

In 1985, he joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as a staff physicist where he had positions of increasing responsibility, eventually becoming Deputy Associate Director for the ICF Program and NIF. He is presently a senior physicist at LLNL while also serving as Associate Director of Science and Technology at Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) of the University of Rochester.

Campbell states, "Joe was a major contributor to the program on Nova that explored the physics critical to ignition that was required to convince the DOE and scientific community of the value and promise of NIF. He also was instrumental to the development of the Weapons Programâs interest in ICF facilities and on NIF and to their present recognition of the role of these facilities in the Stockpile Stewardship Program."

Dr. Kilkenny has received numerous awards during his career. He is a Fellow Of the American Physical Society, a winner of the Excellence in Plasma Physics Research for his work in hydrodynamic instabilities, the AE Conrady Award of SPIE for Optical Instrumentation recognizing his pioneering efforts in high speed streak and framing camera development, and he received an R&D100 Award for the development of a single shot transient digitizer. UWB or micro-impulse radar research at LLNL was born from technology developed for this digitizer. He has published over 150 papers in referred journals, and classified reports during his career to date.