April 20, 1972. Having just brought the SuperHilac (Super Heavy Ion Linear Accelerator) to full energy, Project Engineer Bert Kortegaard is congratulated by American Scientists Albert Ghiorso and Glenn Seaborg, and Finnish scientists Matti Nurmia and Pirkko Eskola.
The Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (LBL)SuperHilac was a major International facility for heavy ion research, enabled experiments which discovered several trans-uranic elements, and made the subsequent advance in accelerators, the Bevalac (Bevatron-SuperHilac), possible.
Nevertheless, only one year later, Korean War veteran Kortegaard was forced to resign from LBL, because his personality was deemed "too abrasive." War can sometimes do that.
Moving to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), though leading much smaller engineering teams, Kortegaard's later technical contributions won two international awards. One example of his later work was recognized at the 1986 IR-100 AwardsPresentation in Chicago for his Precision Laser Alignment Control System, Pacman©
Kortegaard ended his career by creating an Applied Sciences Proficiency program, which provided week-long theoretical and design seminars on LANL engineering problems.
