Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineer Andy Wang knows the difference one person can make - in both coding and community service. After writing control-systems algorithms for LLNL's National Security Engineering Division (NSED) during business hours, Wang spends his free time picking up trash across the Bay Area to help clean the community.
Armed with his car, a high-visibility vest and trash-picking equipment, he searches for "dumping sites" - areas like freeway roadsides, industrial neighborhoods or train stations where trash tends to accumulate. In a few hours, he can single-handedly clean a site and fill as many as 60 trash bags, biohazard and e-waste containers for Public Works to take away. He then returns every couple of weeks to make sure the sites are still clean.
"Everybody deserves a clean environment to live in," Wang said. "It's a shame that we live in such a beautiful place, yet it's trashed all the time. If I can make one thing better, why not do it?"
Wang posts before-and-after pictures of his cleanups on his Reddit and Instagram accounts, which have made him a micro-celebrity in the Bay Area online community and caught the attention of local news. But he takes the most pride in simply being there and inspiring others.
"Anybody can do what I'm doing," he said. "All people need is a shovel, a bag and a trash-picker and they too can make a huge difference to their community."
By the time he began picking up trash in 2021, Wang's work with the Laboratory's Advanced Sources and Detectors (ASD) Scorpius project had instilled the confidence he needed to try something new.
ASD Scorpius is a next-generation linear accelerator that uses short, high-energy bursts of X-rays to assess the effects of aging and manufacturing methods on nuclear weapons. Wang's algorithms are used as a diagnostic tool to study and adjust the accelerator's pulsers, which generate "pulses" of energy that deliver the X-rays for radiographic imaging.
Since Scorpius is a novel type of accelerator, Wang reasoned that the team should try new approaches and software to complement it. The team encouraged his outside-the-box thinking and he developed award-winning algorithms that have become crucial to the project.
"The Lab really encourages getting your feet wet and trying new things," he said. "Even if I fail, I try my best. At the end of the day, failure helps us better understand what we can and cannot do."
He decided to apply this mentality outside of work after growing disgusted by the trash on Interstate 580. He began picking up trash near his home in Livermore, but has since expanded to Dublin, Oakland, Martinez, San Francisco, San José and Menlo Park. He's cleaned coastal wetlands, urban neighborhoods, industrial areas and everything between, and met locals along the way who have given him a deeper knowledge of the area, greater empathy and the encouragement to keep going.
"Seeing people happy to see their street clean really makes me feel like I made a difference," he said. "It motivates me to continue being there for my community because we're all in this together."
Wang sees parallels between his community service and working on ASD Scorpius' large, multidisciplinary team of physicists, mechanical engineers, power engineers and fellow electrical engineers. He enjoys learning about disciplines beyond his own - particularly physics - and incorporating that knowledge into tools that help the whole team.
"When I write algorithms, I have to understand what the physicists need, which means learning about the theory, diagnostics and electromagnetism parts of the accelerator," he said. "Applying what I've learned into a solution is how I learn and get better as an engineer, so that's been very rewarding."
Recently, Wang started applying his skills to his community service by developing a machine learning algorithm that finds dumping sites using Google Street View. He mostly plans to use it for his volunteer work, but he says he's open to releasing a public-facing version once it's done.
Wang is a self-described introvert who typically works alone, but occasionally organizes community cleanups to get others involved. He also encourages others to prevent more trash by using the Public Works resources available - he says most Bay Area cities offer 1-2 free bulk pickups per year. He is regularly offered donations as a token of gratitude, but politely declines.
"I'm just a normal guy who likes making a difference by going into uncharted waters," he said. "I care and I really want to do good work, whether it's writing cool tools for people to use at work or making somebody's day after cleaning up their street."
-Noah Pflueger-Peters
