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Laurie E. Locascio (Fed)

Director of NIST and the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology

Dr. Laurie Locascio is currently the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

From 2017 to 2022, Locascio served as vice president for research at the University of Maryland College Park and University of Maryland Baltimore. She also served as a professor in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering with a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine. Before joining the university, she was at NIST for 31 years, rising from a research biomedical engineer to leading the agency’s Material Measurement Laboratory.

Locascio is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Locascio was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Read a Q&A with Laurie about her own experience as an inventor and NIST's culture of innovation.

The Impact of NIST
The Impact of NIST
NIST Director Dr. Laurie E. Locascio shares her pride in how the agency's work enhances U.S. innovation and global competitiveness through the support of manufacturing technology and programs such as CHIPS. She also talks about how NIST research has contributed to the development of critical and emerging technologies, which the agency then helps translate for industry use and the creation of technical standards.

Awards

  • Member of the National Academy of Engineering (2023)
  • Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2023)
  • Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors (2021)
  • 2017 American Chemical Society Earle B. Barnes Award for Leadership in Chemical Research Management
  • 2017 Washington Academy of Sciences Special Award in Scientific Leadership
  • Department of Commerce Silver and Bronze Medal Awards
  • American Chemical Society Division of Analytical Chemistry Arthur F. Findeis Award
  • NIST Safety Award
  • NIST Applied Research Award
  • Fellow of the American Chemical Society
  • Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering

Publications

Hydrogel-Immobilized Antibodies for Microfluidic Immunoassays

Author(s)
Gloria Thomas, Emad E. El-Giar, Laurie E. Locascio, Michael J. Tarlov
The integration of immunoassays in microfluidic devices is a rapidly developing research area combining the power of immunoassays with the inherent benefits of

Quantum Dot FRET Sensor for Enzymatic Activity in Microfluidic Device

Author(s)
Georgeta Crivat, Sandra M. Da Silva, Darwin Reyes-Hernandez, Samuel Forry, Laurie E. Locascio, Michael Gaitan, Nitsa Rosenzweig, Zeev Rosenzweig
This paper describes the development of new fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET)-based quantum dot probes for proteolytic activity. The CdSe/ZnS

Selected Blog Posts

Created October 9, 2019, Updated July 2, 2024