Leadership   John Sarrao

John Sarrao serves as the deputy director for Science, Technology, and Engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory. In the role, he oversees a $1.9B organization with 3,800 employees, managing the Laboratory’s extensive science, technology, and engineering capabilities in support of the Laboratory’s national security mission.

Before becoming deputy director, Sarrao was the principal associate director for Science, Technology, and Engineering at Los Alamos. Prior to this role, he served as associate director for Theory, Simulation, and Computation for five years. He has also held a number of leadership positions within the Lab’s materials community.

Sarrao’s primary research interest is in the synthesis and characterization of correlated electron systems, especially actinide materials. He was the 2013 winner of the Department of Energy’s E.O. Lawrence Award and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society (APS), and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sarrao’s personal research and technical leadership career has emphasized national security science from plutonium physics research to advanced materials design and discovery to stewarding LANL’s high performance computing resources and simulation capabilities.

Sarrao received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles based on thesis work performed at LANL. He also has a master’s in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a bachelor’s in physics from Stanford University.