John L. Sarrao

John Louis Sarrao (born February 1, 1967)^{[citation needed]} is an American physicist. He was the deputy director for science, technology, and engineering at Los Alamos National Laboratory.^[1][2] As of 2 October 2023, he became the sixth director of SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory^[3]

John L. Sarrao
Sarrao in 2013
6th Director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Incumbent
Assumed office October 2, 2023
President	Joe Biden
Preceded by	Chi-Chang Kao
Alma mater	Stanford University (BS) University of California Los Angeles (MS, PhD)
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Los Alamos National Laboratory SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Thesis	Resonant ultrasound spectroscopy( RUS) study of the structural phase transition in lanthanum-strontium copper oxide (La(2-x) Sr(x) CuO(4)) (1993)
Doctoral advisor	W. Gilbert Clark

Education

In 1993, Sarrao received his PhD in physics from the University of California Los Angeles following a M.S. in physics from UCLA in 1991 and a B.S. in physics from Stanford University in 1989.^[4][5]

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science;^[6] the American Physical Society;^{[7][circular reference][8]} and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.^[9]

Career

He is the principal architect of LANL’s Dynamic Mesoscale Material Science Capability (DMMSC).^[10][11]

He is a board member of the Technology Research Collaborative (TRC).^[12]

Sarrao's research includes quantum computing.^[13]

On June 7, 2018, Sarrao presented Congressional Testimony for the House Science, Space & Technology Committee Subcommittee on Energy on topics including electric grid research and big data.^[14]

Honors and awards

In 2013, he was awarded the United States Department of Energy’s Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for his research in Condensed Matter and Materials Science: “For the discovery and study of new materials, especially those based on Plutonium, advancing understanding of unconventional magnetic and superconducting states in strongly correlated f-electron condensed matter systems.”^[15]

He was honored for his discovery and study of new materials, especially those based on Plutonium, that advance understanding of novel magnetic and superconducting states in strongly correlated f-electron condensed matter systems.^[16][17] The complexity of strongly correlated materials, resulting from coupling among charge, spin, and lattice degrees-of-freedom, allows the emergence of new states and new phenomena, helping promote the development of useful and novel functional materials.^[18]