
Image credit – Todd Cooper / jasontoddcooper.com
Image credit – Todd Cooper / jasontoddcooper.com
President Biden announced
Pending her Senate confirmation, Richmond will take up the under secretary role as it was configured
The week before nominating Richmond, Biden nominated
To stay up to date on nominations for key science positions across the government, consult FYI’s Federal Science Leadership Tracker
Richmond was raised on a farm in Kansas, and in a 2019 interview
She then pursued graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, earning her doctorate in 1980. It was while at Berkeley that she met her husband, physicist Steve Kevan, who is currently director of the Advanced Light Source, an Office of Science user facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Initially intending to work in industry, Richmond instead took up an academic position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Then, seeking to expand her research, she moved to the University of Oregon in 1985. Her work has revolved around experimental and computational investigations of physical and chemical processes on complex surfaces. Taking a special focus
Richmond became director of the University of Oregon’s Chemical Physics Institute in 1991 and also took on numerous leadership and advisory positions
One of Richmond’s career-long priorities has been to improve the position of women in science, and in 1997 she founded COACh
In the 2019 interview, Richmond recalled, “When I got to be mid-career, this would be the late 1990s, it was really bothering me that women at my career level … were not getting recognition for their work. They were not getting invited to talks. They were not getting invited to meetings. They were not getting honors. They were not getting awards. And yet they were just as successful as the men were.”
Richmond joined DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (BESAC) in 1995, at a time when the department was itself working to increase the professional and demographic diversity of the committee’s membership. That shift changed the scope of the committee’s deliberations, as when Richmond and others protested
When Richmond was BESAC’s chair from 1998 to 2003, community-wide access to neutron facilities had reached a crisis point stemming from the shutdown of Brookhaven National Lab’s research reactor, which had followed the leakage of small amounts of radioactive tritium from its spent-fuel pool. Amid continuing public outcry, DOE decided in 1999 to permanently close the reactor rather than maintain it in an offline state indefinitely. The department turned to BESAC
Richmond told the journal Science
Neutron access continues to be a subject of concern
In addressing such matters across the DOE science and technology enterprise, Richmond will be able to draw on planning practices the department started to develop when she chaired BESAC. For instance, in 2001 the committee was charged
Then, in 2002 the Office of Science charged
Since stepping aside as BESAC chair, Richmond has continued to hold influential positions within the U.S. research community, including in other advisory positions for DOE and its national labs. These include seven years as a member of DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technical Advisory Committee and two as chair of the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource’s Science Advisory Committee.
Richmond was the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for 2015, which entailed serving a total of three years in the organization’s presidential line, and then served another three years in the presidential line of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society. She was also recently a State Department science envoy
Since 2012, Richmond’s most prominent role in U.S. science policy has been as a member of the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation.
Currently, she chairs the board’s Committee on External Engagement, which involves leading the board’s relations with other parts of the government, research and educational institutions, industry, and the public. Previously, she led the assembly of the 2018 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, an authoritative statistical report that the board produces biennially on the status of U.S. science.
When that report was released, Richmond pointed
Since then, strategic competition with China has joined climate change in motivating an unusually intense debate over U.S. R&D policy in Congress, with members of both parties arguing a targeted surge in funding is needed. If lawmakers do launch such an initiative and it includes DOE