Senior Los Alamos Official John Sarrao Picked as SLAC Director

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory announced last week that physicist John Sarrao will take the lab’s helm starting Oct. 2. Sarrao currently is the deputy director for science, technology, and engineering at Los Alamos National Lab, overseeing five research directorates.

An expert in condensed matter and materials science, he received a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993 and joined Los Alamos as a staff scientist four years later. He has since held various leadership positions at the lab, including associate director for theory, simulation, and computation.

At SLAC, he will succeed Chi-Chang Kao, an X-ray scientist who led the lab for more than a decade before announcing last fall he would return to a research role.

Since February, the lab has been led on an interim basis by Stephen Streiffer, vice president for SLAC at Stanford University, which operates the lab for the Department of Energy.