Olivia Bamonti’s second stint at Argonne National Laboratory comes with a new role, as the ARM Climate Research Facility’s science liaison and field campaign coordinator.

Bamonti first started at Argonne in 2009 at the Visitor’s Reception Center, where she checked people in, verified identities, communicated with lab personnel, and processed foreign travel documents.

After some time spent working at other places, Bamonti returned to Argonne in June 2015, beginning in the Nuclear Engineering Division.

Bamonti interviewed with the ARM Facility in October 2015 and came on board that November. She officially became the science liaison and field campaign coordinator in January 2017 after Laurel Chapman retired.

Chapman gave Bamonti some advice that she has taken to heart: “Learn what you can, read and understand, keep track of everything, and don’t be afraid to ask questions.”

Given that her employment background has primarily been in administrative support roles, Bamonti is not very familiar with some of the science terms she runs across. But she has plenty of ARM staff around her at Argonne, including Mike Ritsche, Assistant Southern Great Plains Facility Manager.

One of Bamonti’s goals is to simplify documents for quarterly reporting.

“I want to consolidate a lot of things,” she says. “There’s a lot of spreadsheets or reports. I want one or two sources to pull information from.”

On top of learning new responsibilities at work and juggling communication needs of principal investigators (PIs) and the ARM Infrastructure Management Board (IMB), Bamonti is completing requirements for her bachelor’s degree in organizational management. She will graduate in May from Concordia University Chicago.

Her days of higher education might not be over after that. Bamonti is considering a master’s degree in environmental science.

“That’s a little further down the road,” she says.

Although Bamonti has held her new ARM title for just a few months, she hopes to have a long-term influence on the ARM Facility.

“I want my legacy to be—as cliché as it sounds—I want everybody to look back and think I was really helpful with anything that was going on,” she says. “That I was able to communicate efficiently and effectively to be that bridge between the PI and program manager and IMB, to have smooth sailing all across the board, and to develop new ways of presenting, accessing, and simplifying information while having all the information we need to have.”

Bamonti can be contacted at cbamonti@anl.gov.